


Into the Dark

by nb_richie (shipit)



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Death, Detective!Richie, Detective!Stan, F/M, Genius!Richie, Graphic Description, M/M, Panic Attacks, Pining, Platonic Stozier, Policeman!Bill, Policeman!Eddie, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Richie has a bunch of issues, Special Investigators, Violence, police!au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-02-02 17:24:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 23,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12730998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipit/pseuds/nb_richie
Summary: Richie and Stan have seen and dealt with a lot of cases in the years they’ve been working together, from cults to cartels. A case in Derry, Maine, proves to be one of the most horrific for them and for the two local officers they’ll be working with. And on top of it all, Richie keeps remembering things he’d rather forget.(Formerly by beepbeep_rich)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Beta: @etherealous on tumblr for chapters 1-5, @abakerstrilogyhas4books 8-12

“Your hands are shaking,” Stan says quietly, looking away from his neatly packed suitcase. “Scared?”

Richie rolls his eyes, but truthfully, he’s afraid. When he was just a kid, a killer in his hometown is what spawned the dreams of leading the career he now does. An old teacher was abducting and assaulting neighborhood kids before killing them brutally, and Richie had had a close call with him. 

_ Don’t tell anyone, Richard. You don’t want to end up like them, do you? _

This case hits too close to home, and Stan can tell. 

“We don’t have to take the case, Rich.”

“I’m fine,” Richie snaps. 

He focuses on packing again. Unlike Stan’s precise folds, he just rolls up his clothes and throws them into the old suitcase he’s had since he was in college. Another pair of old socks get tossed in beside worn jeans. Casual, he was told, because no one wears suits in Derry except to funerals and church. In a separate bag, one Stan is in charge of, their badges and guns are stowed with three copies of the case file ando two notepads full of Stan’s blocky print and Richie’s messy scrawl.

The assignment is clear. Richie and Stan have to go to a small town in Maine- Derry- to catch whoever’s taking little kids. By some miracle, their bosses have managed to keep the news pretty quiet about the whole thing, but the point stands that the kidnappings- which turn up gruesome bodies a few days later- cannot continue. They’ll be working with two men at the local police department, too. Richie and Stan are to stay together and do everything possible to keep citizens out of harm’s way. Any deaths once they get to Derry will be on their hands.

Stan knows Richie’s afraid- and that he won’t back down from this case. Already, Richie is too invested in it. For years, they’ve worked together, seen things that no human being should ever have to. Sometimes, Richie thinks that Stan knows him better than he knows himself. 

“Hurry up, our flight leaves in an hour.”

Richie sticks his tongue out at Stan, but slams his suitcase shut anyways and grabs his phone. 

A cab will take them to the airport, then the plane will fly them to Bangor, a larger city just an hour drive North of Derry. Then they’ll get a rental car and drive down to the city. An apartment is waiting for them, one they’ll be living in and using to explain their sudden appearance. Stan is going to be an artist, and they supposedly come to Derry to find somewhere to inspire his work. In the town’s eyes, there will be nothing to suspect, when in reality they’ll be investigating alongside the police. 

William Denbrough and Edward Kaspbrak are the names on the personnel reports they received. Denbrough has red hair that’s starting to thin, despite his young age of twenty five. He stares solemnly into the camera, jaw set. Everything about him screams protector. The other one, Kaspbrak, has a small face and wide brown eyes. He still looks like a child, and supposedly, he’s only five foot four. Richie has this urge to protect him, hide him from the dangerous world. It’s ridiculous- Kaspbrak is a cop, and he can handle himself, even if he doesn’t look it. 

For the time being, Richie banishes all thoughts of the two Derry policemen and follows Stan out to the cab. “Did you remember the boarding passes?” Richie asks suddenly.

Stan pulls them from his pocket. “Yes, Richie. I also have your glasses, in case you run out of contacts. And you forgot your wallet, so I have that too.”

“Stan the man, where would I be without you?”

“Dead, probably.”

He’s joking, but it’s true. Stan has saved Richie’s ass countless times, and vice versa. They always know when the other one’s gotten themselves in trouble, and how to get them out of it. A case they spent nine months on last year comes to mind, and how it culminated in Richie about to be killed by the leader of a cult after he accidentally blew his cover. No more than ten minutes after Richie and Stan were separated for the ritual, Stan came in with backup and dragged Richie out, lecturing him about being more careful the entire time. Still, when they got home, Stan said he was glad Richie was okay before they parted ways for a well-earned shower and a thirteen hour sleep.

Since he’s so lost in his thoughts, Richie almost doesn’t notice when they get to the airport. Stan taps his shoulder and nods toward the door. While he gets to his feet and grabs his suitcase, Stan pays the driver and picks up his own things. They’ll be in Derry in just a couple hours.

* * *

 

On the plane, Stan falls asleep within ten minutes of takeoff. The night before they were both up late, but Stan had gotten up two hours before Richie to prepare, so he’s exhausted beyond the powers of complimentary coffee. Now left without anyone to bounce his thoughts off of, Richie isn’t so sure he should think about the case. He’ll get stuck in his own head quickly, or spiral down a dark line of thought he won’t soon recover from. 

Well, he’s always been a little bit of a masochist, what does he have to lose?

Richie grabs his notes and the case file out of Stan’s carry-on and spreads them on the fold down tray to look at. Missing persons reports, the case reports of the two Derry policemen, witness statements, and autopsy reports- complete with pictures. The autopsies are what he needs to look at right now. The way a killer fulfills their crime can be very telling of their psyche. In Richie’s head, a profile is just beginning to develop. Male, late twenties, early thirties. Unmarried, lives alone probably outside of the main area of Derry. He’s someone the kids would trust. Judging by the level of damage to the bodies, he has a personal vendetta against children. They’re not simply preyed upon because they’re weak, or because the killer is someone who enjoys stealing innocence. Every child is found missing limbs, scraped to hell, every injury jagged and unclean. It’s angry. Richie’s working theory is that the killer was a victim of bullying and/or sibling abuse. No normal person harbors that much rage toward children.

_ They’re all stupid. You aren’t.  _

He shakes his head to clear away the memory.

The case is too thin for the death toll. No one has much of anything to go on- no forensic evidence, no suspicious behavior, no late night 9-1-1 calls. There should be leads, even if they’re just dead ends. Not even Richie can pull much from something so lacking in information, and Stan said last night that he has no idea where to start his investigation. 

A stewardess walks by, glances at Richie’s table, and goes pale. She stutters asking him if he wants coffee- to which he says that a coke will be just fine, please. Several minutes later, she comes back with a plastic cup of soda and hands him the drink in shaking fingers. He thanks her and takes it, pausing from his work long enough to take a drink. Before the flight touches down, he and Stan will probably have to go through extra security because of the disturbing images the flight attendant saw. Stan will also probably yell at him for pulling those out on the plane where anyone could see. It’s too late now, the damage is done.

Richie pulls out one of the witness statements, one from a woman named Beverly Rogan who supposedly saw one of the missing children get taken. Specifically, she says that the child was taken by a clown. Shivers run down Richie’s spine. He’s never liked clowns. But in the next statement, her husband, Tom, says that Beverly was drunk at the time and she’s always seeing things. Beverly’s statement was then recanted.

Suspicious. 

Judging by her statement, Beverly was definitely shaken up by what she saw, but she didn’t imagine it. Her words are clear and descriptive, and she talks about the clothes the child was wearing when he went missing down to a T. For some reason, Tom didn’t want her to give a statement like that. Richie makes a note of Tom Rogan and the fact that he should definitely be questioned more.

For the rest of the flight, Richie really doesn’t find anything of note in the case. 

When the announcement comes on for the passengers to fasten their seatbelts and put up their trays, Richie packs everything up and shakes Stan’s shoulder until his eyes fly open and he bats away Richie’s hand. Still sleepy, Stan yawns as he sits up straight. He mindlessly adjusts the collar of his shirt and pushes his curly hair out of his face. “Almost there?”

“We’re landing soon. And we might have to go through some extra measures…”

Stan narrows his eyes. “You had the pictures out again, didn’t you?”

The slight lift of Richie’s shoulders in a half-hearted shrug is the only answer he gets.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie,,,, is an asshole,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is gonna be much slower than I thought bc I'm writing ch 7 rn and it's still this same day in the fic rip

After the plane lands, they go through security, get their suitcases, and manage the drive to Derry, Stan drops Richie off at the precinct on his way to their temporary apartment. This is always the most nerve-wracking part, for Richie. New people find him odd, or annoying, or both. They want him gone as soon as possible, and he’s often more than happy to oblige. 

Derry’s police headquarters are in a small brick building. It’s one story high with a thick glass door at the front. To the left of it hang tarnished metal numbers of its street address. When Richie walks inside, several faces turn to stare at him. The main room has an entryway desk, and behind it are six more desks with paperwork stacked on them. Three of the desks are occupied, and people are milling about in the area. One walks through a door into what must be a break room or something.

Richie goes to the young woman who must be a receptionist and smiles at her. “D’you know where I could find Officers Kaspbrak and Denbrough?”

“Can I ask why?”

“My son’s gone missing.”

The lie rolls off of his tongue too easily, but it does the job. All the color drains from the receptionist’s face and she directs him to a door on the other end of the main room, almost indistinguishable from the walls. He thanks her and goes to it, keeping his head down to avoid making eye contact with anyone. Its knob turns easily under his fingers, and the door swings open silently.

Sitting on the gray couch in the office are Denbrough and Kaspbrak, both poring over a stack of papers. Kaspbrak is the one who looks up and tells him to sit down and they’ll talk to him in a moment.

Richie tosses himself down on the couch and drinks in the sight of the room. It’s warmly decorated, and the desk has two pictures on it. One is of a little boy in a yellow raincoat who looks something like Denbrough, but not quite. The other picture is a group of kids, maybe twelve or thirteen, standing in a living room. There’s five of them- a boy in a huge hoodie, a girl with orange-red hair and a bright smile, a boy with his focus on the book in his hand, and a pair that are very clearly Denbrough and Kaspbrak when they were younger. The two of them go way back, then. 

“You said your son went missing?” Kaspbrak asks, glancing at Richie and holding a pen poised above a notepad. 

“I don’t have any kids, actually. Richie Tozier, at your service.”

He sticks out his hand for Denbrough to shake and receives a mildly irritated look in return. “And your partner is…?”

“Stan’s dropping off our shit, he’ll be here soon. Care to introduce yourselves at all?” Richie tries not to laugh at the face Denbrough makes when he curses so casually, or the way Kaspbrak hasn’t looked away since Richie first opened his mouth. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s kinda rude to stare?”

“I’m Bill Denbrough and this is my partner, Eddie Kaspbrak,” Denbrough- Bill- says before Eddie can respond.

Richie nods thoughtfully and gets to his feet again to go to the desk in the room. The drawers are unlocked, easy access to dig through. 

“Relax, Big Bill, I’m just looking for a pen and some paper.”

Another easy lie, mostly because it’s half true. He is looking for those, but he’s also doing a brief search to make sure that the cops can be trusted. Later, Stan will probably conduct a more subtle and thorough one. 

Richie finds a cheap plastic pen and takes a sheet of copy paper from the tray in the desks printer. Uncapping the pen with his teeth, Richie draws a line across the paper. “Can you make me a timeline? First disappearance to last. Include when you found witness statements and where everything happened. Thanks.” He hands the paper to Bill. “Eddie, take me to the morgue, I’d like to examine the bodies firsthand.”

“Can you prove you are who you say you are?”

For a moment Richie panics looking for his badge, but then he remembers Stan slipping the lanyard over his neck before leaving the car. He fumbles beneath his shirt and produces his badge, the leather warm from his skin but the metal cool to the touch. Eddie examines it closely, and still doesn’t look convinced. Bill looks at Eddie, tilts his head to the side, and scrunches his eyebrows. In response, Eddie nods. They turn back to Richie, and Bill grabs one of his arms, Eddie the other. He tries to move but their hold is strong. 

_ You’re only hurting yourself when you struggle. _

“If you wanna have kinky sex, just ask. Consent’s key, you know,” he says with a slight quiver in his voice. Richie tries again to get out of their grip, but still can’t. Panic fights it’s way up his chest, clenching around his lungs and making his heart beat double time before he crams it down. “Seriously though, let go of me.”

His arms are wrenched behind his back and Bill cuffs them. He’s the one who grabs Richie’s collar and drags him from the room, Eddie right behind. They take him to another room, one that’s undecorated and hasn’t been cleaned well in quite some time. Most of the room is taken up by an old, pockmarked wooden table with three chairs at it. Two face the door, and the third opposes them. Bill shoves Richie into one of the chairs facing the door, then backs away to stand beside Eddie. 

“You have nothing to arrest me for.”

“You lied to a police officer,” Bill says. 

It’s hard not to laugh. “I didn’t lie to you. I lied to your receptionist. There’s a difference.” 

“Just tell us why you’re actually here,” Eddie says. His arms fold over his chest and his foot taps against the ground. “And when you plan on going back to whatever hole you crawled out of.”

“I work for the government- your boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss. I’m here about the murders. Weren’t you told I was coming?”

Bill and Eddie look at each other again. This time, Eddie shakes his head, and makes an annoyed face when Bill turns back to Richie. 

“We were told that their two best agents would be helping.”

“That would be me and Stan!” Richie exclaims with a grin. “Wouldn’t call us the best but we  _ are _ pretty damn good. Stan’s great at seeing weird obscure details and getting people to talk to him-”

“And you do what? Annoy suspects until they confess?”

Richie shrugs, ignoring the bite of Eddie’s insult. “Go check your office, Stan should be here soon.”

More silent communication between the two police officers. They keep glancing at Richie, and Eddie looks like he might punch someone. It’s almost like they’re arguing about something, probably whether or not to believe Richie that he’s one of the agents coming to help. Or maybe who’s going to go look for Stan.

Bill seems to be the winner, judging by the satisfied smirk on his face. He opens the door and steps out, leaving Eddie and Richie alone. 

“You wanna uncuff me, Eds?” Richie asks, raising his hands so they’re above the table. “These are kinda uncomfortable, and like I said, if you want kinky sex you just have to ask.”

No reaction, not even an upward twitch of Eddie’s lips. Which, Richie notes, are kind of chapped, and a little pouty. There’s no time like the present to take a look at Eddie, is there? Not like Richie has anything better to do. 

His hair is a little longer than in the photo on his profile, with curls tugging at the ends. There’s more of a tan to his skin, including freckles across the bridge of his nose and tops of his cheeks. Eddie’s clothes look slightly too large on his body, just like bags are beginning to sink in beneath his eyes. This case is taking its toll on him. 

“Stop staring at me like that. And never call me Eds again.”

Richie sticks his tongue out at him. 

“Real mature. I’m really supposed to believe that you work for the government?”

Just as Richie opens his mouth to answer, the door breaks open again behind Eddie. Bill comes in first, with Stan right behind him, arms full of file folders. 

“Can’t leave you alone for ten seconds, can I?” He asks, the sigh evident in his voice as he turns to Eddie. “Stanley Uris, I’m his partner- unfortunately.”

Stan gets a genuine smile from Eddie as Bill uncuffs Richie- and it doesn’t annoy him at all. Really, it doesn’t. 

The second he’s free, Richie scoots his chair back so he can kick his feet up on the table. Like always, his first instinct is to project confidence, hide weakness that can be used to destroy him. Nerves are what get you killed in a job like this. Stan sees right through the act, and gives Richie a look that means they’ll talk about it later. 

After a quick chat that Richie doesn’t bother to listen to, the four of them split ways. Eddie and Richie are going to the morgue, and Bill’s taking Stan to interview the witnesses again. Great way to spend a day, looking at dead bodies. Eddie’s face is scrunched up at the thought of it, and his foot taps in annoyance against the hard floor.

“My company that bad, Eds?”

“Don’t call me that.”

Richie smiles to himself as he gets to his feet. That’s a nickname he’ll definitely stick to.


	3. Chapter 3

The morgue is in a separate building across the street from the precinct, and thank god for small miracles that it’s cleaner. Sure, the exterior is in much the same grimy state, but the interior smells like ammonia and has waxed tile floors. Walking through it is almost uncomfortable for Richie, too quiet and clinical for his liking. Eddie doesn’t speak to him at all until they get to the room before the one holding all the bodies. He instructs Richie to put on scrubs, as though Richie’s never been to one of these places before.

Richie doesn’t bother with a sarcastic quip about it. Being funny is hard when on the other side of the door in front of you are dead children. He shuts his eyes when Eddie opens the door, trying to prepare himself to see what the pictures showed him in real life. This part of the job never gets easier.

Someone else is already in the room, a tall man maybe Richie’s age with baby fat still pulling at his cheeks. After some thoughtful studying of his face, Richie realizes he’s sweatshirt kid from the photo on Bill’s desk. That only leaves two people unidentified, but given the size of Derry, Richie will probably meet them soon.

“Ben, this is Richie, he’s helping us with the case,” Eddie introduces.

Ben smiles at Richie, his face pleasantly welcoming and warm. He seems the type to hug his friends and quietly read poems to himself late at night in front of a fireplace. Honestly, Richie can’t tell if he’s suspicious or not.

A gloved hand extends for Richie to shake, which he does, with a pointed look at Eddie over his shoulder. “Ben Hanscom, M.E. for the Derry police.”

“Richie Tozier, professional asshole.”

His joke makes Ben laugh, but not Eddie. 

The two of them sober up quickly, once they remember why Richie and Eddie have come. Ben beckons them forward with two fingers and pulls the sheet off a body in the center of the room. It’s a boy, curly hair and broken glasses, chunks dug out of his stomach and thighs. Behind Richie, Eddie makes a small noise in the back of his throat, but Richie doesn’t flinch. He’s seen worse- seen the infliction of worse.

_ Stop crying, Richard.  _

Every injury is jagged, which is consistent with all the other victims. Now that Richie can see them closer, he agrees with the autopsy that reports the cause being something like a mouth. It’s not too large to be inhuman, but it’s certainly bigger than average. Maybe false dentures, or a large dog. The cause was definitely something with teeth, and the strength to cause damage like that. Ben starts to explain that, but Richie holds up a hand to silence him.

“When was he found?”

“This morning,” Eddie says. “No full report on the body yet, we were waiting for you to come take a look before Ben did anything too thorough.”

Richie nods and looks at the blood still coating the body. It’s dried now, but still bright enough to have only been a few hours old. The kid died today, shortly after the wounds were inflicted. He can’t see a cause of death right away, although Ben will tell him in a report later. Either way, he’s not here for the cause of death, he’s supposed to look at the injuries and see if that tells him anything about the psyche of the killer. 

Teeth. Something bit this kid, and probably the others. Judging by how large the portions missing from the other victims are, it could be a dog or a wolf. They were alive when it happened, but something else killed them before blood loss did. Suffocation, usually. Handprints bruise the necks of some, but others never had the chance, even though their windpipes are crushed on occasion, vertebrae cracked. 

The killer wanted them to suffer, but he wanted to be the one to take their lives himself. Once again, it’s clear that he hates children. He’s not a sexual predator, none of them are hurt like that. But Richie has to rethink his idea that the killer is a loner. He has too much hatred and anger to stop at just the children. It’s likely he has a wife, but no children of his own- at least, not currently. If he had any, he killed them. And he’s most likely abusive toward his current wife. That’s not a theory Richie particularly likes, but it’s something to go off of. 

“Any others still here? Or are they buried?”

“The first few have been, but there’re some still here,” Ben says.

“I’d like to see them, please. In chronological order of being found.”

Richie looks at Eddie, whose face has gotten noticeably paler since they arrived. His eyes are cast to the ground, occasionally flicking up to look at the body- the little boy- lying on the table. Cold, just like the metal. He’ll never play outside or go to school or fight with his mother again, a reality that’s likely settling in for Eddie. None of the little kids will, not anymore. Their lives have been brought to an abrupt, painful close. Derry isn’t a huge place, murders probably aren’t common, let alone brutal ones like this. Neither Eddie, nor Ben, nor Bill are used to seeing the grotesque mutilations of children like this. They don’t live the same life Richie does, he has to remind himself of this.

“You should- you should probably go catch up with Stan and Bill, Eds.” Richie’s tempted to grab Eddie’s fingers and give them a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll be fine on my own.”

Eddie opens his mouth to protest, but then he nods and leaves, still glancing back at the body. 

“Bill’s better about it than he is, dunno why Eddie came.”

Now Richie’s focused on Ben again, and in turn, the bodies. Thinking of them like that makes reality easier to block out. It was one of the first things he learned- how to separate actions from emotions. Eddie has a harder time with it, Richie supposes, and Ben is almost uncomfortable when he has to get too close to the bodies. A wave of something that ties his stomach in knots runs through Richie, a response to thinking about the circumstances. This isn’t something that most people are familiar with. Even police in big cities full of disgusting cases get sick at the ones Richie and Stan are usually assigned to. Pity, maybe, or something like it could be a name for whatever Richie feels thinking about Eddie.

The first body is the one Richie recognizes as the first one found. No one could identify her, because her face is missing and there’s no distinguishing marks on her body. She’s well into the beginning stages of decomposition, despite the efforts of the freezing temperatures and some chemicals that make the air smell rather unpleasant. Not that rot smells great either, but still. She has little burns on the palms of her hands, circular like cigarette butts. Some are older, scarred over. Others are from just before she died. 

“Doesn’t match any missing persons, no one recognizes anything about her. I think she’s maybe six, and she shows signs of severe malnutrition and long term physical abuse. There’s poorly healed fractures on her right arm and three of her ribs. At the time of her death, she had nothing in her stomach and very little in her intestines. Either her abuser killed her, or she escaped her abuser only to be caught by a sadist.”

Another thing to confirm his latest theory. Victim #1 was most likely the daughter of the murderer, and the killing spree started with her. She matches the M.O., but it’s sloppy and unpracticed. No face, no ID, no tracking it back to the parents, but she was tortured before she died. The burns, the cuts littering her torso and and legs, and the cause of death. Ben tells him that it’s a fractured skull, and it killed her before whatever thing with teeth bit off her face.

He wants to feel something, looking at this little girl. Unloved. Hurt. Alone. Even in death, unclaimed. She’s so much like himself when he was younger. It’s unnatural to feel nothing staring at her like this, but that’s just the way Richie is now. No dead bodies, however horrible they are, affect him anymore. Even Stan, desensitized as he is, was visibly upset at the destruction of these bodies- children- bodies. Does it make him broken, to feel nothing like this? Did Mr. Gray break him, by showing him such awful things every day for months?

_ I’ll let it slide this time, but don’t you dare throw up again after this. _

“The next one?” prompts Richie, tearing his eyes away from the body. 

Another girl, about fourteen. Fifth body found. Her left hand is gone, and Ben theorizes it was the teeth thing. She has a face marred with bruises, nose misshapen and with two neat trails of long dried blood dripping from the nostrils. Ben says the injuries on her forearms are defensive wounds from putting her hands in front of her face to protect it from whoever was beating her. 

Sixth body. A toddler. Missing both of his legs. Ninth. Ten years old. Eyes carved out of her skull. Eleventh. Teenager. Neck at an odd angle. Left arm gone. Twelve and thirteen were found at the same time. They were twins. And they got twin missing hands. 

By the time they’re done, Richie has more to go off of for his case, but Ben looks sick to his stomach and Richie thinks he’ll lose it if he has to look at another body and almost wish he felt something, even a faint stab of pity. Anything is better than nothing. 

He bids Ben goodbye and throws away his scrubs and latex gloves before he leaves. Stan texted him saying that he, Bill, and Eddie are at their temporary apartment, followed by Richie’s new home address and instructions to call a cab. They’re even supposedly going to save him pizza. Pizza, to satiate the appetite he doesn’t have. As it is, Richie has to eat more than he’s ever hungry for to make Stan worry less. 

When he gets there, he’ll tell them what he thinks of the killer now. Their reactions are easy, even for the two Derry police officers Richie’s just met. Bill will be interested and take notes, occasionally asking a question like an engaged student. Stan won’t make a sound until Richie is finished, if he chooses to talk at all. Eddie will likely disagree for no reason other than the fact that he doesn’t like or trust Richie all that much, a fact that’s more painful than it should be. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Angst, anyone?

The cab that picks Richie up is grimy, with a sticky back seat. He rattles off the address Stan sent and turns his focus to staring out the window. It’s barely three in the afternoon, so the streets are filled with children playing and laughing. The sun is bright, kind of unusual in Maine in November, but none of the kids will complain about having good weather to play in.

“Haven’t seen you around before.”  
Richie looks at the cabbie, a man with dark hair and a squared off jaw. He looks like the type who would snap Richie in half given an excuse.

“I just moved to town with my friend, it’s more peaceful around here. I’m uh, Finn Wolfhard.”

_Don’t lie to me, Richard._

“Pleasure to meet ya, Finn. Tom Rogan.”  
He bites the inside of his cheek to avoid saying anything in response. Tom must be the one who made Beverly recant her statement, Richie can’t imagine that there’s more than one Tom Rogan in Derry. On instinct he reaches for his phone.

“Anything I should know about Derry?”  
One word text message to Stan: _Rogan_. If something happens to Richie, and he isn’t at their apartment in twenty minutes, Stan will know who did it. _Cabbie_? Stan replies.

“It’s a nice enough place, ‘cept the murders, but I’m sure you know about those. Just mind your own business and everyone’s great.”

”I’ll keep that in mind.” _Red flags, Uris_.

“Can I ask what you think? About the murders, I mean. I’m kind of a crime enthusiast.”

Tom hums to himself. “I think they’re terrible. Takes a lot to do that to a person. But kid, don’t go around asking people ‘bout them. You’re new in town, and- they’ll think you’re the killer.”

Solemnly nodding, Richie looks back out the window. That conversation was steered rather abruptly away from Tom’s thoughts, but that doesn’t mean much. Normal people don’t like talking about tragedies so casually. Still, he has a bad feeling about Tom, and he’s learned to trust his intuition when it comes to cases. Something about him is guilty. Maybe it isn’t the murders, but he isn’t innocent. He can’t be. Is he abusive to his wife? Probably. Is he the killer? The first body flashes in his mind. Tom and the girl have the same hair color, if that counts for anything. Maybe DNA could prove something, if Richie can get a sample.

His phone buzzes. Stan again. _Be careful._

 _No shit Sherlock,_ he texts back.

For the rest of the ride, Tom is silent, and so is Stan.

Richie arrives at the apartment unscathed. He pays the fee, bids Tom goodbye, and goes to 7C, the number of his new home. Two quick knocks on the door, because Stan has both keys and it’s currently locked.

The one to open the door is Eddie, still pale from the morgue that morning. Richie smiles at him and nudges past him into the apartment. Small, cozy. Normal. The walls are white and undecorated, the furniture threadbare, and the carpet stained. Finally, somewhere he can kick up his feet on the couch and Stan won’t yell at him.

“Pizza’s on the table,” Bill says. While Stan is looking through a file, all of Bill’s attention is on him. His expression is soft, his lips parted slightly and eyes a little unfocused. Someone has a crush on Stan. “We left you two pepperoni.”

“Eat at least one,” adds Stan.

The temptation to flip him off is real, but Richie knows he’s just trying to take care of him. It isn’t an attack or anything. He settles for making a face as he grabs a slice. It’s Pizza Hut, generic and no different from thousands of other meals he’s eaten since he was hired at twenty-one. Stan isn’t a huge fan of pizza- he likes ‘proper meals,’ or whatever. Probably part of his whole thing about Richie eating at least twice a day. He’s a little uptight about neatness and routine and keeping them both healthy. On the rare occasion Richie gets sick, Stan makes him stay in bed and do nothing but watch brain-melting TV all day.

Stan watches him take a small bite off the tip of the pizza, and, seemingly satisfied for now, goes back to his work.

“I like Rogan for it,” Richie announces, beginning to pace the narrow stretch of clear floor at the front of the room. “Fits the profile.”

“Not even kind of. Tom Rogan has a wife-and he’s lived here his whole life. He’s younger than the description, he lives in town, he-” Eddie cuts himself off when Richie lets out a long, dramatic sigh. “What?”

Another tiny bite of pizza. “Doesn’t fit _your_ profile, Eds. Our killer is late twenties, early thirties. The kids trust him, they know him. He’s a sadist and he isn’t escalating, even when the time between the murders is inconsistent. No violence more extreme than normal for him even when it’s weeks between murders. So he has to have another punching bag. A wife, maybe. He’s filled with hatred for children, possibly due to childhood trauma. Oh- does Rogan have a criminal record? How about Beverly Rogan?”

“Richie…”

He ignores the warning in Stans tone.

“At least a phone call about a domestic dispute. Hospital records for Beverly, maybe. He says she drinks but I don’t know if that’s an actual reliable claim. I think that what she saw was real.”

Eddie and Bill look at each other.

“He’s just trying to keep her quiet or something. He did it, he had to have done it because who else possibly could have? The only witness is too scared of him to say anything and he did kill his own daughter. Tore off her whole face so no one would know.”

“Beep beep, Richie.”

“So why does he do it then? What happened to him? Maybe there’s something on file about his parents. There has to be. There can’t not be, because he did it, he murdered them after he sicced his dog or something on them so that they’d die in horrible pain, and-”

“Richie.”

His words are a jumbled, incomprehensible mess at this point, even to himself. It has to be Rogan. There’s nothing in the case. Someone has to be responsible and it has to be Rogan. He did it. He had to.

“Richie!”

_He thinks you’re going to help him. Do you hear him yelling your name?_

Richie stops and stares at Stan, who got to his feet and some point. They’re a couple feet apart, and Stan has his hands out in front of him in a calming gesture. Behind him, Eddie has frozen and Bill can’t seem to decide if he’s afraid or intrigued. Maybe both. Stan steps a little closer. Richie steps back.

“You need to calm down, Rich. Deep breath.”

_Calm down. You won’t get hurt if you follow directions._

“Look at me. Focus on me. Breathe. In, out.”

 _Look at me, Richard_.

“You’re okay.”

_You’re fine. Stop crying._

Fat tears roll down Richie’s cheeks and he doesn’t know why. Nothing upsets him. He’s seen it all. He’s fine. He can handle this, he can always handle it.

“No, you can’t. You can’t do it this time, Richie.”

_You can’t do anything right._

_“_ Count to ten with me. One. Two.”

_If I get to three, you’ll regret it._

He winds up on the floor somehow, knees drawn to his chest as it spasms. Richie scrabbles for something- the trash bin by the door- and leans over it to throw up.

_Weak. Pathetic._

“Bill, Eddie, you should probably just go. I’ll call you later.”

They walk past Richie without a word. In the doorway, Eddie stops and turns around, looking back with an unreadable expression on his face. He starts to say something, but stops himself. Softly, he shuts the door.

Stan doesn’t try and touch Richie- he knows better- but he gets closer. His eyes are brown, not blue. His hair is curly and somewhere between brown and blonde, not salt and pepper black. His lips are twisted into a concerned frown, not perked up in a smirk. He shows his hands, palms up, to Richie, proving that he isn’t holding anything that could hurt him.

“Richie. Focus on me. I’m real. What you’re thinking, what you’re remembering- it isn’t.”

Not anymore, but it used to be. It’s filling his thoughts, consuming him, making his chest tight and brain a scattered mess. Screams echo in his ears. He smells blood and burning flesh and rotting bodies instead of pizza. Pain flares up on the palms of his hands where his nails bite into them. Consumed, consumed by his memories and it fucking hurts. He has to solve this case but he can’t when everything he feels and thinks is dictated by the past.

“Focus on right now. C’mon, Rich. What can you see? Five things.”

Five. Five things. Richie forces himself to look around the room. Five. Stan. Stan is one. He says so out loud, and earning an encouraging nod. The carpet. Two. Case files. Three. Couch. Four.

_Take a good look around._

“One more thing, you can do it.”

Eddie’s jacket is draped over the back of the couch. Richie stutters on the name for a moment before it comes out his mouth. To his credit, Stan doesn’t cut him off or try and finish the name for him, just lets him work through the phrase.

“Four things you can hear.”

A car drives down the road outside their apartment building, clunky and loud, nearly drowning out the frantic ticking of the clock on the wall. The neighbors above them are stomping around in a way that rattles their walls a little bit. Outside, a child laughs. Richie should list those things to Stan- that’s what he’s supposed to be doing, at any rate- but he can’t bring himself to. Irrational anger fills him.

“I’m not a fucking child,” he spits. “Stop- stop talking to me like- like I’m a victim. Stop it.”

“Rich-”

Richie stands up, albeit unsteadily, and crosses his arms so Stan can’t see how badly his hands are shaking. He can’t look his best friend in the eyes. Instead, he stares at the ground, at the stained carpet fibers between his feet.

“Stop.”

It takes Stan a minute to formulate a response. “You’re off this case, Richie.”

His jaw drops.

“You can’t take me off the case, you’re not my fucking boss! And they need me, they need me to help them or they’ll never figure out that it’s Rogan! I have to keep working on this!”

“What you have to do is fly home. You can’t handle this one.”

His tone leaves no room for argument. Almost immediately he’s on the phone with their actual boss, running over the situation and getting approval of his decision to remove Richie from the case, even though he doesn’t actually have the authority to do so. He even hands the phone to Richie to confirm that he’s being sent home.

“Fuck you, Stan,” he growls, and goes to the bedroom to grab his still packed suitcase. “I’m staying here, and I’m finishing this fucking case, even if I have to do it myself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So let’s take a look here- Richie thinks it’s Rogan. Agree or disagree? And who’s ready for Richie’s backstory in the next couple chapters bc it’s fuckin rad and I gave myself the heebie jeebies writing it


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know, I tease. Next chapter is entirely devoted to Richie's backstory. 
> 
> Also i posted a one shot yesterday called The Many Faces of Eddie Kaspbrak so if you wanna look at that,,,,,

Stan tries to convince Richie to put himself first, for once, and just drop the case. He doesn’t understand. This is a puzzle, one Richie  _ has _ to solve. If he doesn’t, he’ll never be able to forgive himself for failing. Stan just doesn’t seem to get that. 

“I’m not going home, Stan. I’m not running away from this.”

He drags out his suitcase. There’s bound to be a hotel nearby or something, a place where he can stay until the case is over or Stan comes to his senses, whichever comes first. On his way out, he takes his wallet and glasses from Stan while ignoring his protests. Stan doesn’t understand, he never will, even if he’s the best friend that Richie has ever had. No one can even begin to comprehend that yeah, he went through shit, but no, he isn’t fragile. 

“Think this through, Rich,” Stan says, standing between Richie and the doorway with his arms folded over one another. Richie can’t make eye contact. “You don’t have anywhere to go but home. This isn’t safe, you can’t just run off with no regard to your own well being.”

“Watch me.”

It’s that easy to just walk out of the apartment. He goes straight to the police station and asks for a directory to find a hotel or something, not really sure where else to go. Before he can talk to the receptionist, Eddie and Bill are right there.

“Stan called, said to keep an eye out for you,” Bill says. “He’s worried about you.”

“I’m. Fine.”

Eddie stares at the ground. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”

“I was coming here for a directory, see if I could find anywhere offering a room.”

Richie realizes then how often Bill and Eddie talk without saying a word. Eddie looks tired, defeated. He seems liable to throw up at any second. Bill, on the other hand, seems concerned but determined. He nods, taking Eddie’s left hand and rubbing over his knuckles. It’s a couple-y gesture, but not for the two of them, clearly. They’re just friends. They seem to forget that he’s there, Eddie letting Bill pull him into a hug and rest his chin on his friend’s head. 

“I think you and Eddie staying together would be good for both of you,” he says softly. 

Richie makes a face, but the protest is just for show. He’s actually quite pleased to have somewhere to stay, especially with someone he’s as fond of as Eddie. And it’s not like Eddie will be too alright on his own tonight either. The bodies affected him more than he seems to want to admit.  Or maybe something else is bothering him, but either way he isn’t looking too well. 

“I’ll take you two back to his, and then I’ll be with Stan if you need anything.”

At least Eddie might continue to work the case with Richie instead of forcing him to pretend it isn’t happening, which is an improvement over Stan right now. Well, maybe. Eddie isn’t in good shape by any means. He probably needs rest above all else, and to not worry about the case for a few hours. That’s fine- Richie can work on it on his own. There won’t be a problem as long as Eddie doesn’t try and stop him. 

Bill guides the two of them outside the building and into a cruiser. While they settle in the back, he texts someone on his phone and takes the time to periodically glance at Eddie and Richie in the rearview mirror. Before they leave, he nods at Eddie. He looks down as he takes off his badge and sets it between him and Richie. Resignation from the police force? Unlikely, but removal from the case? Probable. He can ask when they’re alone at Eddie’s, and hopefully get some solid answers about why Eddie has been looking so sick to his stomach all day.

* * *

 

After Bill drops them off and walks them inside, he takes off. Eddie’s apartment is a great deal more homey than the house the government paid for for Richie and Stan. Pictures line the walls, of Eddie and Bill and Ben and the other two kids in the photo from Bill’s desk, but they’re at staggered ages. The kitchen counter has a flower vase on it, filled with roses in shades of yellow and pink. Everything is clean and well organized, and the color scheme is mostly bright, cheerful colors. His couch is pink, like the roses, and the soft off-white carpet compliments the throw pillows. A small laptop and a bottle of water sit on a caramel color wooden end table.

“I’m gonna shower, make yourself at home.”

Richie hums in acknowledgement and kneels by the door to open up his suitcase and pull out boxers, his glasses, sweat pants, and a tee shirt. When Eddie’s done in the shower, he’ll ask to use it. His shirt is sticky with sweat and his curls are clinging to his forehead and the back of his neck. He can wash off the blood on his palms from when he dug his nails into them earlier. All in all, he feels pretty shit, physically, but it’s nothing that a cool shower and some clean clothes won’t fix. 

While he waits for Eddie, he looks around the apartment a little more. A sliding glass door behind some closed blinds opens to a porch. All it has is a chair and a little folding table with an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter. Weird, Eddie doesn’t seem the type to smoke. Richie goes back to examining the inside of the apartment, including the kitchen. In the cabinet next to the stove, he finds bottles and bottles of pills with labels he couldn’t even begin to pronounce. Some are pain meds, some are antibiotics, some are anti-anxiety. All of the ones on the second shelf are empty, but not yet in the trash, leaving only seven bottles on the first shelf. He shuts the cabinet on them, making a note of their existence. 

Just as he goes back to the main room, Eddie comes back out in a pair of red shorts and a yellow pajama shirt that hangs off of his shoulder. “You can shower, if you want. In the hallway, door on the left. There’s towels in the cabinet across from the sink.”

Richie nods and gathers up his clothes, trying not to look at the bare skin exposed by Eddie’s pajamas. He knows it’s not the time for checking him out, but he doesn’t care much. Once he’s clean he wants to curl around Eddie and make him look at least a little less sad, despite the fact that he knows it would be greatly overstepping his boundaries. There’s just this instinct he has to protect Eddie that won’t go away.

Snapping out of his thoughts, Richie goes to the shower. Eddie’s bathroom is just as clean as the rest of the apartment, with a color scheme of greens, blues, and yellows. The little towel closet contains several neatly folded navy bath towels, a stack of yellow hand towels, and several washcloths. Richie just takes a bath towel and plops it and his clothes on top of the toilet seat. He turns on the shower then, and lets it reach the ideal level of warmth while he strips off his clothes. The mirror shows him what he doesn’t like to see: his sickly bony chest, the scars that trail from his neck down to below where the counter cuts off his reflection, and the flush to his cheeks. Biting his chapped bottom lip, he leans forward to pluck out his contacts, pulling the world out of focus.

Into the shower, where the water is just warm enough that he doesn’t shiver, but cool enough to feel nice as it washes away his sweat before he can reach for what he assumes is the body soap. He pulls it close enough to his face to read the label, confirming his suspicions. It smells vaguely like apples, and covers him with bubbles while he washes up. On the other hand, Eddie’s shampoo has a fragrance not unlike flowers. A weird combination, but one that Richie quite enjoys. The shower is refreshing, enough so that Richie’s reluctant to get out of it. He has to, after ten minutes of just standing beneath the spray and enjoying the absence of thoughts that race through his brain at a thousand miles per hour.

Soon enough, he has to get out and dry off. His hair takes the longest, because his curls like to hold onto the water and drip it down the back of his neck. To get it completely dry is an unrealistic expectation, so Richie just settles for mostly dried. Then it’s on with the boxers and the shirt and the joggers and the coke-bottle glasses that make his eyes look huge. It’s possible that the tired, emotionally drained Eddie might not even recognize him right away with them on.

Richie finds a laundry basket in the towel cabinet beneath the washcloths and tosses in his towels and soiled clothes. If he’s lucky, maybe Eddie will wash them, because for some reason, Richie’s never really figured out to wash his clothes. Growing up, he would toss things in with his father’s and when he got a job working for the government, everything was either dry-cleaned or Stan did it because of his weird perfectionist ways. 

He makes his way back to the living room, where Eddie has opened the laptop that was on the end table of his couch. His eyes are scanning over something, occasionally pausing while he types things out.

“Whatcha workin’ on?” Richie asks, tilting his head to the side as he plops down beside Eddie. “Anything cool?”

“Just the case. Bill doesn’t want me on it.”

Nodding, Richie peers at the screen to see Eddie looking at pictures of his and Stan’s notes, comparing them and then writing his own in another window. It’s a little surprising that he’s capable of deciphering the mess that is Richie’s handwriting, but the compilation Eddie’s typing makes sense. At least, it does until he copies down the profile that Bill made, not Richie’s.

“That’s wrong,” Richie says, pointing at it.

“No, that’s the profile, Richie.”

He furrows his eyebrows in annoyance. “Wrong profile. Your killer isn’t-“

Eddie looks at him with tired eyes. “Yours isn’t right, Richie. It doesn’t make sense. He can’t be childless and also have murdered his own child. He can’t be single and be abusive to his wife. You have two profiles that keep crossing over.”

“Well, it’s Tom Rogan.”

“And what’s your proof?” he asks. “I can’t arrest someone because you have a bad feeling.”

“Trust me Eds, I-“

“Don’t call me Eds! Look, I know that this case is fucking you up, because you lost it at your apartment, it’s fucking me up too. Bill’s little brother  _ died _ the last time there was a child murderer on the loose. We have our gut feelings, but we can’t just run with it like we did when we were kids. Get that through your fucking head, Richie.”

The teasing half smile that was on Richie’s face falls. “My intuition has never been wrong. Not when I infiltrated a cult. Not when I took down a serial rapist. Not when I was a kid and an asshole teacher ruined my life. Have some faith in me, Eddie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the meanwhile, any guesses?


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now, the moment you've all been waiting for.........................
> 
> Richie's backstory!

“Asshole teacher?”

Richie finds himself nodding, even though he should make Eddie back down there, before he says too much. “You could call him that.” Somewhere in the back of his throat, up rises a lump that’s impossible to swallow.

He begs Eddie with his eyes to leave it, but Eddie doesn’t seem to notice or care. 

“What happened?”

So much happened. An impossible amount, all of it sticking in Richie’s brain for today at least, in more than just fragments that leave him shaking. The last time Richie remembered so much, it was in a nightmare two years ago. His screaming had woken up Stan, and it took days for him to recover from seeing so much pain. So much blood. So… much everything. And a great deal of it at his own hands, desecrating other children who didn’t deserve what they were put through by Bob Gray and his prodigy, Richard Tozier.

He thinks about being taken. His parents weren’t home- they never were- so it was laughably easy for Mr. Gray, a third year teacher, to come into Richie’s home and grab him by the hair and drag him away. While he was brought to Mr. Gray’s home, he remembers being terrified he was going to die, but also relieved that his life might finally be over. Mr. Gray was quiet, in an unsettling sort of way, leaving Richie to try not to cry or ask a question that might get him killed, Even at nine, he was an exceptionally bright child, and it didn’t take him long to realize that he had been abducted by the killer plaguing his sleepy hometown in Indiana. 

The part of Mr. Gray’s house he was brought to, the basement, had been perpetually too warm and reeked of blood and infection. Within minutes of going down there, he threw up on his own shoes. Mr. Gray didn’t like that, and promptly informed him that he better not do it again. Unsure of what the consequences could be, Richie vowed to himself not to allow his body to betray another physical reaction to what he was seeing. 

Two boys were down there already, chained to the wall. Both were barely conscious, but one of them opened his eyes to plead with Richie to help him. He had to look away. Mr. Gray grabbed the boy with the open eyes, and got up in his face. Richie tried to ignore the way the boy started crying almost immediately, with little success.

“Richie, please…” the kid moaned, weakly reaching out with one hand before it was jerked back by his cuffs.

“He thinks you’re going to help him,” Mr. Gray said, laughter behind his words.

His name came from the boy again, this time in a scream as the knife buried in his side was twisted by Mr. Gray’s liver spotted hand.

“Do you hear him yelling your name?”

Richie nodded, more out of fear than anything else, and did nothing but watched as Mr. Gray pulled out that same knife and pushed it back into the boy’s body where Richie thought his heart might have been. Blood gushed out around the knife, more of it in something like a fountain when Mr. Gray pulled the knife out for good. It looked like it hurt quite a bit, and it sent chills down Richie’s spine. Bile rose up in his throat again before he could choke it down to avoid throwing up and possibly incurring the madman’s wrath. In minutes, he was dead on the floor in front of Richie. He can’t be sure if he screamed or not.

The other boy, as it turned out, was for Richie. Mr. Gray taught Richie all about inflicting pain and killing, the other boy being his practice. When he died after a month, he was replaced with another boy, younger, faster to cry and bleed. It didn’t take long for the violence to stop affecting Richie. He grew to expect it. When he woke up, it was under the expectation that he would make himself and Mr. Gray a quick breakfast, and while Mr. Gray was at work, Richie quietly worked away on his canvas, carving him into something to please his teacher. Sometimes, if he thought he could get away with it, he would run to the bathroom to throw up during the day. That was usually when he cut too deep and saw guts, or muscle.

Over the eight and a half months Richie was there, he went through four different boys, while Mr. Gray went through thirty. People assumed that Richie was dead, and his parents pretended to cry at the public funeral thrown for him. Mr. Gray made him watch on TV so that he knew that even if he managed to escape, he’d have nowhere to go. It was an unnecessary pain when Richie’s parents didn’t love him before he was taken, anyways. That was perhaps one of the most cruel things that Mr. Gray had done to him.

His last canvas was one that has haunted him for over a decade. Six years old, his name was Adrian and he had lived across the street from Richie before Mr. Gray took him. He bled more than most, a result of some disease that kept his blood from clotting, and he screamed every waking moment. At least, he did until Mr. Gray got annoyed and slit his throat one morning before school, ordering Richie to clean up the mess while he was gone.

Richie escaped that day, and found his way to the police in hysterics. Most of the tragedy was already vanishing from his mind. It was a defense mechanism, repressing all the memories that would otherwise haunt him and drive him up the wall until he had no choice but to be committed into an asylum, where he would live out his teenage years and die by suicide in his mid-twenties. He spent nearly three days trying to convince the officers that the shredded details he did remember were reliable enough to go arrest Mr. Gray and save the four children still living in his basement. None of them were what Richie was. Over and over, Richie was promised that he was special, he was smart, he was better than the other kids. It kept him alive, but it left him irreparably damaged. 

While he was with Mr. Gray, he saw things no child- no human- should have ever had to see. The panic attacks over things he didn’t remember more than bits and pieces of, the nightmares that left him sobbing but with no memories, they plagued him for years. Sometimes, they still do. And all that Richie can do is wait for the moments of pain to pass. If he was lucky, Stan or his old psychiatrist would be there to help, but that was never a guarantee. All Richie could count on was drowning in fear and blood and the awful stench and sound that filled Mr. Gray’s basement. His only constants were not being okay,

On the rare occasions he wasn’t afraid, he was paranoid, waiting for it to hit him and send him sprawling back from the recovery he had been working so hard at. There was a time where he tried going on medication for his constant terror, but after the third one that proved to be more damage in side effects than it was good at its job, he gave up. No point putting himself through the insomnia and the dizziness and the days in a depressive state when it barely managed to quell his fears.

No one ever found out the extent of what Richie went through. The psychiatrist found out about what the police told him, as well as a little supplemental information from Richie himself. Mostly he just knew that Richie had spent nearly nine months with a murderer, and that while he was there, he committed involuntary manslaughter that the court never bothered to charge him for. Stan knew bits and pieces, like the fact that the nationally famous Bob Gray case included Richie. He was the one that led the police to find all the bodies and rescue the remaining kids. The other thing Stan knew was that Richie cried when someone called him Richard, so he avoided it and kept anyone else from saying his given name.

“Richie?”

“It’s not important,” Richie says, pressing his right thumb against his left palm. Dull pain flares up, reminding him of when and where he is. It competes with the racing of his heart. “Drop it, Eds.”

Eddie seems to recognize that the usage of the much-hated nickname as a deflection. He also watches Richie dig his thumb into the little crescents he made when he was fighting with- with Stan? No. Mr. Gray? That was never a fight. With himself? His memories? It doesn’t matter. Eddie can tell that whatever front Richie has up isn’t real. He sees through him in a way that’s reminiscent of Stan. 

“What happened?”

In return, Richie sees plenty about Eddie. He got sick, looking at the bodies. Judging by what Eddie said about Bill’s little brother, who must have been the yellow raincoat kid on Bill’s desk, the bodies were a familiar sight. 

“Tell me about Bill’s brother,” Richie counters. 

Eddie seems to lose what little color had returned to his cheeks. 

“Intuition, you said? Tell me that story.”

“You get off on this or something?” Eddie says weakly. 

Revulsion in Richie’s stomach at the mere thought, twisting and turning. He shakes his head, not trusting his voice. Luckily, Eddie doesn’t ask him to speak aloud, instead sighing and retreating back into his memories of Bill’s brother. 

“He disappeared, after Bill sent him outside to play on his own while he was sick. We spent like a year looking for him, me and Bill and Ben and our friends Bev and Mike. Eventually we found the guy doing it. He almost killed us.  Set us on the path to becoming cops, I guess.”

There’s much more to the story than that, even if Eddie isn’t ready to tell. Richie can’t push him on it, it would be far too hypocritical, but he makes a note to conduct some personal research.

“I’m sorry,” Richie says eventually, in an effort to clear the silence. “Can we go back to the case?”

“Bill had me removed.”

“And? You were still working on it when I came out here, Eds.” 

Eddie nods to himself. His laptop is still open to the case notes anyways, where more than half of Eddie’s typing, Richie is pleased to note, comes from his own scribbles. “You’re a profiler, right?” His voice is thin and unsure, and Richie can’t decide if it’s a result of his residual illness from the memories of Bill’s brother or simply a side effect of his distraction. 

“That I am.”

“Then lets make a profile. No contradictions, no messing around, just facts.”

A strained smile makes its way back into Richie’s face. “We can do that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my dear friends, Richie and Eddie are going to work this case whether or not they're technically on it. Who can see how that may cause some problems?


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes I know I know, I'm sorry, please let me live. Yesterday was Xmas so I didn't really have the chance to post the chapter.
> 
> For those who didn't see the note, I am in desperate need of a new beta, because I can't get ahold of mine. If you're interested, /please/ give me your email! I've had a couple people reach out, but without an email, I can't send the chapters. I want this fic to be good for y'all, as opposed to the garbage stream that it is.
> 
> Also- Into The Dark will stop at Chapter 12, after a certain someone is released from the hospital- I'll let you wonder who. It will pick up again in a sequel (Unnamed as of now) from Stan's point of view. My plan is another twelve or thirteen chapters there. Between the end of this fic and the start of the next, there'll be a handy lil two week hiatus for me to get everything all written up. Thanks y'all <3

It takes hours, but Richie and Eddie eventually come up with a profile that makes sense. Dinner time comes and goes without either of their notice, as do several texts to Richie from Stan. Bill even sends Eddie a couple that aren’t seen until after the new profile is made.

White male, late twenties. History of abuse, both as a victim and as a perpetrator. Definitely has a wife, currently abusing her, but likely has no children of his own at all. He’s most likely an addict, a smoker or drinker. The children trust him at the time of their abduction, and if Beverly Marsh is to be trusted, he dresses as a clown in order to make that possible. He has a dog or lives near the forest where he has access to wolves or something that could mutilate the children so badly. He has lived in Derry for a very long time, seeing how well he knows when the children will be unsupervised. 

“Richie, Don’t suggest Tom Rogan,” Eddie says, reaching for the cup of coffee he had made himself at some point. “Bev wouldn’t marry anyone like that.”

Bev, Richie has learned while they were profiling, is the girl from Bill’s desk photo: Beverly Rogan. When she was younger, she had been a force to be reckoned with. She was all fire and fight, more likely to brawl than any of her friends. That had changed in college, and now she seldom spoke to them. This leaves Richie with a sour taste in his mouth and higher certainty that Tom Rogan isn’t the model citizen he seems. 

“Got any other leads, Eds? You said yourself that Beverly would  _ never  _ be a drunk and that something wasn’t adding up.”

While he talks, Richie feigns disinterest, staring at the little bowl on the coffee table he hadn’t noticed earlier. A peach and red betta fish swims in the waters, seemingly holding Richie’s attention. In reality, all his brainpower is dedicated to the case. His eyes are the only things focused elsewhere. Stan is used to it, but Eddie isn’t because he calls Richie’s name before he speaks every time to make sure that he’s being heard.

“Richie.”

Richie flicks his attention to Eddie instead of the fish for a moment. “Yeah?”

“Why’re you so fixated on Tom?”

“I just know he did it.”

“How?”

He made Beverly recant her statement. He fits the profile. He acted really weird in the cab with Richie. He’s far too reminiscent of Mr. Gray. Something about Tom isn’t right. Eddie doesn’t seem to see it, and it’s hard for Richie to make him. Impossible, even. There’s no way he can explain that the look in Tom’s eyes was the same predatory gaze that Mr. Gray had. All Richie really has to do is convince Eddie to let the two of them interview Tom and he’ll see the same thing Richie does. 

“Did you find a police record for him?” he questions, avoiding Eddie’s curiosity.

“I’ve done a couple house calls for domestic disturbances. Tom says he and Bev were fighting, and she nods, then they shut the door. I’ve never seen her hurt or actually seen ‘em arguing.”

_ Don’t say anything, Richard. _

Richie smiles to himself and stands up straight. The fish swims another lazy lap around the tank as he does so. “I want to interview Tom and Bev. Separately. Can you handle Tom on your own for that?”

“It’s one thing to keep working with what we have, it’s another to investigate. Neither of us have any real authority, Richie.”

“They don’t have to know that.”

The way Eddie then looks at him is the way one might look at a madman. His eyes are wide in surprise, with an element of fear hidden behind them. Pink lips hang open slightly. His cheeks, still pallid, have started to color again with the increased beating of his heart. Richie thinks to himself that Eddie is much prettier when he looks more alive. 

“I’ve met Tom, he can’t see me. Bring him to the station, say it’s routine questioning for everyone, and I’ll talk to Bev.”

“I can’t take anyone to the station, I’m on paid vacation,” Eddie tells Richie, sounding almost put out by the limit. “Bill would kill me.”

“Bill’s not your dad. Catch Tom in a cab, it’s his job, and keep him talking as long as possible. I don’t think Bev works.”

A ghost of a smile works its way onto Eddie’s face. “Web designer. She never leaves the house anymore.”

They settle into an easy rhythm, working out how to conduct the interviews and what to ask. Eddie seems more alive than he has since the morgue, a fact that makes something warm curl around Richie’s heart. It’s a feeling similar to cracking a tough case or actually making Stan give one of his rare smiles. For a brief moment, part of him is tempted to lean over and kiss Eddie. He quickly pushes the thought down and presses his thumb into his palm again. When he does, an involuntary wince forces its way up his throat. Eddie looks at him with concern, flicks his eyes to Richie’s hands, and silently pulls them apart before he goes back to his work. 

It’s nice to be quietly and unobtrusively cared for, even in an action so small. 

“Anything I should know about Bev?” The question is a deflection, a way to change the topic of his thoughts. It kind of works. “Anything to avoid saying?”

“Basic victim etiquette. Be gentle, Richie. Don’t push her too hard.”

The Bev that Eddie had described from his childhood wouldn’t have needed to be slapped with the “handle with care” label, but times have clearly changed for her. Richie makes no jokes, nor does he laugh. This case is causing Eddie plenty of anxiety without him worrying about Bev’s mental health. A solemn nod is the best response, which Richie gives. 

“Think Stan and Bill are making any progress?”

“Dunno. Bill’s got great intuition but he’s not the smartest.”

Now it’s time to smile. “Stan’s the opposite. He’s brilliant but he’s got the gut feelings of a brick.” 

Eddie actually laughs at that remark, making it the first quip of Richie’s he’s found anything but annoying. Richie feels something like pride at finally earning a positive reaction before he can push it down again. He’s been doing that a lot since he got to Derry- shoving down everything he feels so as to pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s not unusual for him, it’s just rare to do it so much. He wonders if it’s the case and it affects him more than he realizes, or if it’s Eddie. He’s known him for a day, no more, and already feels like Eddie is someone he has to protect and coddle and keep close. Eddie feels like an old friend. 

“You still with me?”

“Yeah, sorry. Got distracted by how  _ cute _ you are, Eds.”

An involuntary remark, one he should apologize for. He’s about to, but then Eddie shoves Richie’s shoulder and tells him to shut his mouth. The tips of his ears turn red in a mock blush. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“It’s not flattery, it’s  _ flirting _ . There’s a difference.”

“Ought to give Bill some tips. He thinks Stan’s hot.”

For the first time in (four? five?) years, Richie considers the fact that other people find Stan attractive. He is, with bright brown eyes and curly hair and dexterous fingers that Richie is very familiar with. When they were much younger, and just beginning to get to know each other, they had tried taking things past a platonic level. Romance was never their thing, but they sometimes spent intimate nights together to celebrate closed cases and birthdays, or to release some of their built up tension. After a while, they stopped, because things had gotten too complicated. 

Bill though… it isn’t too much of a shock, considering the way he’s been looking at Stan since he and Richie arrived in Derry. And Eddie has known Bill for probably ten, fifteen years, and he says that Bill harbors at least some kind of attraction. It’s improbable that he doesn’t at the very least want to get laid. Richie thinks, however, that Stan deserves a real relationship. If Bill hurts him, he’ll be dealing with the mighty wrath of Richie Tozier. 

“He’s not gonna have meaningless sex with my Stan.”

“Your Stan?” Eddie snorts, “He’s not property, he’s a person.”

True, but he’s the closest friend that Richie’s ever had, and that means he deserves the best.

“I know, Eds. I mean, Bill can’t use my best friend to get off. He’d be devastated.”

“He isn’t like that.”

Richie nods thoughtfully. In the few hours he’s known Bill, he’s gotten an idea for who the policeman is. Fiercely protective of Eddie, rather serious, and with a strong moral compass. He’s a natural leader, and he seems to be well-liked. Something about Bill even makes Richie feel a little safer. Bill feels familiar, in a weird sort of way. Like an old friend as well. His office was decorated warmly, despite the glass ashtray on the corner of his desk with cigarette butts sticking out of it. It even had couches, paired with the dark walls and caramel wood of the desk in a cozy coordination.

The cigarettes.

“Is he the reason you have a pack of Camels on your patio?”

An inconsequential detail that maybe not many people would have noticed, but Richie sees small things that mean nothing to anyone other than him. Eddie doesn’t strike Richie as a smoker; he’s too delicate. His cabinet of medication attests to that. 

The question brings a strange expression to Eddie’s face. “Bill doesn’t come over much, we always go to his.”

“So who smokes?” 

Eddie presses his lips together in a fine line and shakes his head, nonverbally asking Richie to back off. He wants to keep pressing, but just this once, he drops it with a shrug. Eventually Richie will figure it out.

“Can I crash on your couch?” he asks as Eddie begins to awkwardly pack away his notes. “I promise I’ll be a good roomie and make you breakfast in the morning, Eds.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Richie braces himself for Eddie to kick him out. “My bed’s warmer and softer and you’re a guest. I’ll take the couch.”

Richie wants to argue and tell Eddie that he deserves the bed, or suggest they share it, but both of those are stupid when Eddie isn’t even his friend. 

“Okay, thanks. See you in the morning.”

“Yeah. Bedroom’s at the end of the hall.”

He feels like he should say something else, but nothing comes to mind, so Richie picks up his suitcase and goes to the bedroom. It’s neat and well decorated like everything in Eddie’s apartment. The room contains a bed, a dresser, a nightstand, and a single window with the grey curtains drawn open.

_ Close them. No one needs to see.  _

Richie releases them from their strings so they block out the natural light and crawls into Eddie’s bed. It’s soft, downy, and smells faintly of detergent. The sheets remind him of Stan’s, clean and almost unwrinkled. 

Off come Richie’s glasses, folded neatly on Eddie’s nightstand. Off comes his shirt because he can’t sleep in one. Off goes the artificial lamp beside the bed. Richie shuts his eyes and takes deep breaths, but sleep doesn’t come for a long time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So- will Richie and Eddie sleep through the night? Will they get right into interviewing Bev in the next chapter? Will I ever be less obnoxious in the author's notes? Find out next time


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You think that I can just let them do their interview? W R O N G

_ “Look him in the eyes, Richard. I have no place for cowards.” _

_ Warm blood, sticky and with a thick copper stench, oozes between the fingers of Richie’s right hand. His eyes peer through thick lenses at the only friend he had. It was delusional to think he could save even one of Mr. Gray’s victims.  _

_ “Now twist the knife.” _

_ The knife turns immediately one hundred and eighty degrees counterclockwise. It makes a sickening squelch as it moves, but the noise can hardly be heard over the screams of someone who did nothing to deserve this kind of pain. Richie wants to look away. His fingers shake, vibrating the knife in the kid’s stomach in a way that must be excruciating. _

_ “Good. Does he deserve to die?” _

_ “No.” _

_ A rough, familiar palm connects with Richie’s cheek and snaps his head to the side with a dull ache. For a moment, he’s dizzy and all he hears is a loud ringing noise. He tastes blood in his mouth, spits it onto the floor in a small dark puddle. Quickly, he runs his tongue over the gash in his lip made by two buck teeth when they dug down in shock.  _

_ “Does he deserve to live?” _

_ “Yes.” _

_ Richie keeps his eyes locked on the little boy whose name he doesn’t even know. It’s better he doesn’t have time to flinch before the next blow that he knows is coming. A punch. A kick. A slap. It’s all the same. He isn’t scared of being hit.  _

_ Nothing hits him.  _

_ Mr. Gray’s belt, heavy and with biting edges, curls around his neck. His lungs scream in protest as it tightens, threatening Richie’s supply of oxygen. He reflexively drops the knife to scrabble at the belt. He knows it’s futile but he can’t help it. The room darkens at the edges in a strange, hazy way. A rising note like a scream wails in Richie’s ears painfully, but he barely hears it. Sparks dance in front of his eyes. Pain. Can’t breathe. Can’t. Can’t.  _

The first thing Richie does when he wakes up is gasp for air. He registers that he’s awake, that he’s twenty seven years old, that he’s fine. His heart and lungs don’t get the message, still working double, triple time. In the dark, he can’t completely reassure himself. He fumbles for the lamp and turns it on, filling the room with a soft yellow glow. The walls are not the pale grey that Stan had painted those of Richie’s bedroom when they moved into their house. The bedspread is too fluffy, too pastel to be his own. The bed has too many pillows. The carpet is a mottled brown, not Richie’s golden brown wood. He doesn’t know where he is; he’s still too addled with sleep and remnants of fear to figure it out.

_ Focus, Richard. _

Trying not to throw up, Richie eases his way out of the bed and grabs at the floor for a shirt. He pulls it over his head as he fumbles through the bedside drawer for a weapon, anything to defend himself with. The letter opener he comes up with is better than nothing, right? Richie holds it tightly in his hand, blade pointed outward defensively to protect himself as he advances toward the door. It’s not even locked.

In the hallway, there’s nothing more threatening than a couple picture frames that Richie doesn’t care to look at. From his stance, he can see the front door. He can get out. Carefully, silently, he can creep toward it. Freedom tastes airy on his tongue. When he gets out, he can call Stan, and-

“Richie?”

He spins around, the hand with the letter opener extended in front of him not unlike a fencing saber. The man in front of him is small, dressed in only oversized pajamas, and has sleep clinging to his features.  _ Eddie _ , his brain helpfully supplies. 

“It’s like three am, what’re you doing? Why’re you- put- put it down, Richie. Put down the knife.”

It’s not a knife, it’s a letter opener. 

“Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?”

Richie’s brain is starting to put together the pieces, but it’s slow. 

“I’m Eddie. I’m a police officer. You’re in my apartment right now, in Derry, Maine.”

The case hits Richie like a ton of bricks. 

“Richie, I need you to put down the knife.”

“It’s a letter opener,” he corrects, commanding his fingers to unfurl and drop it on the floor.

Eddie is slow to move forward and pick it up, but quick to jump back. “Good. Why’d you have this?”

There’s no good reason now that Richie is slowly regaining his senses and reminding himself that no, he’s not at home, but yes, he’s safe. He has to formulate an excuse, a good one, but nothing comes. Richie clenches his fists until there’s a sharp stab of pain from his nails digging in. He can focus. He’s okay. 

“Sleepwalking?”

It sounds more like a question than an excuse.

“You weren’t asleep.”

“I…”

Eddie rubs his eyes tiredly. “You were screaming. It woke me up. I was about to go check on you and then you’re here with the knife- letter opener- and I just-“ he cuts himself off and looks at Richie with wide eyes. “You had a nightmare.”

“When I woke up, I didn’t remember where I was. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. Go back to bed.”

“I won’t be able to.”

They stare at each other for a minute. Eddie moves first, nudging past Richie and into his kitchen. He wordlessly fills a kettle with water and sets it on his stove. As Richie watches, he digs around and produces two old, clearly well loved mugs. Each gets a tea bag and a generous dollop of honey. When the teakettle shrieks, Richie winces and tries not to cover his ears. Eddie’s steady hands turn off the burner, fill each mug, replace the kettle, and bring the tea to the living room. He nods for Richie to come sit beside him. 

“When my mom died, I got nightmares for a couple months about her rising from the grave to come after me. Bill and I shared an apartment, cause we were still in college, and he always stayed up with me and made us tea to help me calm down. We talked about the nightmares, sometimes.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Richie asks with more bite than he means to. 

Eddie shrugs. “You’re a good guy.”

“I’m not gonna tell you about my nightmare. I’ve known you for one day, Eds, and it’s not exactly a light load. But thanks. You’re a good guy too.”

He pretends he doesn’t see Eddie smile, instead focusing on the tea. It’s still slightly too hot, but it has a nice taste sweetened by honey. If he didn’t know before it was a comfort drink, he’d call it one now. Even the warmth it radiates against his hands makes him feel better. Warmth. Suddenly, he’s hyper aware of how closely pressed to his side Eddie is. Glancing down at him, he sees that between sips of tea, Eddie’s eyes droop shut.

Richie puts his own mug down first, then snatches Eddie’s away to set beside it. He gets a sleepy protest, but Eddie quickly settles against his side. Richie throws an arm around him, and before he knows it, the detective is once again sound asleep. He knows he should take Eddie to bed or settle him down on the couch properly, but he’s almost afraid to move in case it wakes him up. Tentatively, Richie reaches out to grab Eddie’s case file from the table, managing to bring it back to himself without disturbing Eddie. If he’s lucky, maybe he’ll come across something in the case that makes everything fall into place. There has to be some crucial detail he’s overlooking.

His eyes find Beverly’s statement almost automatically. A clown, of all things? It’s like something out of a horror movie, a badly written one at that. The more he looks at the statement, the more sticks out. Why did she have such clear memory of the kid who went missing? No matter how fresh the memory, she shouldn’t remember things that precisely. There has to be an error somewhere, something wrong, something not glaringly obvious. 

The kid’s shirt, his shoes, his pants, his hair, his socks- his socks. Beverly says he wasn’t wearing socks, but his mother said he was and they found one of the socks still on the body. That’s a weird thing to get wrong, considering her close attention to even the color of the boy’s shoelaces.

Is this a clue? A cipher? What’s the code that Richie is missing in the statement? He looks at the obvious things, like the first words of each sentence or letters of each word. No dice. It’s not the first word of every line either, that wouldn’t make sense. Every other, every third, every fourth word is wrong. Writing down every other word is the closest to making sense, but it’s like someone’s trying to tell a story backwards.

“Backwards,” Richie parrots aloud. 

He grabs a pen and jots every other word down, from the end to the beginning, on the back of one of the photos. 

_ I know I saw something. He was the one to do it I saw the kid. His green eyes I remember he was I saw him get killed by the man taking them his name I know him. House by and I saw to that he’s quick and help I.  _

Richie smiles to himself, proud that he’s figured it out. He ignores the pang of anger that he hadn’t caught this earlier. He can bring it up in the interview with Beverly in the morning. Well, it’s already morning. He can bring it up in a few hours. 

He moves to set down the file, freezing when Eddie stirs against him. Only when he settles down does Richie dare to finish his movement. The fish lazily swims around in its tank a few inches away from the edge of the file. Richie starts to wonder why Eddie even has a beta fish. If he had to guess it’s so that he has something to come home to other than an empty apartment. No amount of interior decorating will change the fact that Eddie is the sole inhabitant of this little flat in Derry. He must be lonely. That would explain why he’s so quick to be physically affectionate. 

“You’re adorable, you know that Eds?” Richie says, shifting so that he’s stretched out more on the couch with Eddie half laying on him. “I wish you weren’t so alone, I really do. You deserve better.”

Eddie smiles in his sleep.

“Already enjoying the sound of my voice that much? You’re too precious.”

Richie finds himself fidgeting with the hem of Eddie’s shirt. 

“We’re pretty similar. Both of us are detectives. Duh. I mean, like, we’re both lonely. You try to make your house feel welcoming, less empty, but it doesn’t work. And me? I don’t know how to feel anything good anymore. If I’m lucky, maybe I get a little pride, after a good solve, but that’s all. You feel, Eddie. Maybe you feel a little too much.”

He shuts his own eyes and gets as comfortable as he possibly can on this little shared couch. Sleep won’t come back to him, but he’s going to relax at the very least. In the past twelve hours, Richie has gotten far too worked up, far too quickly. It’s time to let his mind go blank for the evening. It’s scarily easily to force himself to go completely numb, to the point that even physically, he barely feels. His fingers drop from Eddie’s waist and rest against the couch slightly curled upwards. Richie makes himself grab the blanket that had been kicked onto the floor and haphazardly drape it over himself and Eddie. A soft sigh comes from Eddie’s lips and he seems to push slightly closer to Richie. 

It doesn’t take long for Richie to zone out, but he doesn’t realize he’s fallen back asleep until he opens his eyes again the next morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do promise that Richie will conduct his interview of Beverly in the next chapter. I cannot, however, promise that all will go well and according to plan. I understand that this part of the story will wrap up with a lot of questions left unanswered, but that's what the next part is for.
> 
> Before I leave, I must ask: How do you think that interview will go? What do you think will happen?
> 
> (Also I've rebranded as @nb-richie)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For those who haven't heard, I've decided against writing the sequel.

Richie’s cold. Shifting uncomfortably, he reaches for something, although he can’t make himself think what it is. A half formed protest finds its way out of his mouth, only to be gently shushed. He shivers. Cold fingers, colder than the air that has him chilled pull something off Richie’s face. Soft material drapes over him, tucks in around his body, begins to build back up some of his warmth. 

“Go back to bed, Richie.”

And he does.

* * *

 

“Morning,” Eddie calls from the kitchen.

Slowly, Richie cracks his eyes open, just realizing that he had actually fallen back asleep on Eddie’s couch, the two of them pressed together. The blanket he had thrown over Eddie has been tucked neatly around his own body, keeping him warm and doing nothing to help him fight off the dregs of sleep still pushing at his consciousness. He slowly sits himself up, cracking his neck as he fumbles on the coffee table for his glasses. 

“How long’ve you been up?”

“About half an hour.”

Eddie’s face peers at him over the breakfast bar with his lips pulled down at the corners. Even from the living room, Richie can see hundreds of thoughts written into the fine wrinkles around the eyes and mouth of a detective who suddenly looks much, much older. He wants to smooth those lines away.

The first thing that Richie really recognizes is that Eddie wants to talk about what happened during the night. About the nightmare, the letter opener, the fact that they fell asleep completely entangled on Eddie’s couch. Richie slept. He slept after a nightmare. And he just woke up, late enough that the sun has already risen and currently shines through the blinds in stripes across the floor.  

“You had a rough night last night. Between what happened at Stan’s, and your nightmare,” Eddie says slowly, picking and choosing the words he wants to use. 

“Water is wet.”

Eddie presses his lips together.

“I’m fine, Eds. Don’t worry about it. Now-” Richie takes a pause, gathering his words- “Last night, after you went back to bed, I took another look at Beverly’s statement and I found a pattern.”

Coming over from the kitchen with a fresh cup of tea, Eddie settles himself on the couch beside Richie. He reaches for the file with one hand, the other on his mug. Quick eyes scan over Richie’s notes and the message he got from Bev’s statement. Then a second time. Then they slide to Richie and back to the paper again. He clears his throat. No words come out of his mouth the first time he tries to speak. 

“Bev’s smart, so she definitely could have intended this. Talk to her about it, just to be sure,” Eddie says eventually. 

He stands up and mumbles something about getting dressed as he disappears into his room. Time for Richie to do the same. His luggage is still thrown open by the door, a mess of socks and shirts and the like. Quietly humming to himself, he digs through it for casual clothes to wear to the Rogans’. Jeans make sense, but should his shirt be more casual or formal? Beverly will know it’s a police interview, so there’s no real point in trying to dress undercover. In the end, Richie throws on a black undershirt and some weird Hawaiian shirt like he wore when he was a kid. Comfortable. Simple. 

“That’s an affront to anyone who’s ever had eyes.” Eddie has come back into the room dressed casually, much like the day before. His eyes drag over Richie’s own outfit with hint of laughter. “You should probably change.”

“What’s wrong with this?”

“Everything, Richie. Everything.”

He sticks his tongue out defiantly, but still shrugs off the Hawaiian shirt to appease him. The undershirt looks a little weird on its own, Richie thinks, and clearly so does Eddie He wrinkles his nose and goes over to Richie’s laundry to pull out a blue Freese’s tee from an undercover job in a record store. He throws it at Richie, nearly hitting him in the face, and stands back up with a flourish.

“Tom’s cab’s here, so you should head over to Bev’s in a few. Her address is on the table.”

Eddie blows Richie a sarcastic kiss and strolls out the door, leaving him without the time to think up a witty retort.

Smiling to himself, Richie finds the address and looks up directions on his phone. The house is five minutes away on foot. He grabs his folder and pocket knife before he leaves. Part of him is curious about Bev. She isn’t stupid, he knows that much, but it’s impossible not to wonder how much of her supposed spitfire personality is left from her childhood when she’s married to someone like Tom Rogan. A twinge of worry twists in his stomach at the thought of Eddie all alone with someone who Richie has convinced himself is the killer. 

“Ridiculous,” he scoffs to the empty street as he walks. “A cop can take care of himself just fine.”

_ You can’t take care of yourself Richard. You need me.  _

“I don’t need anyone.”

The wind picks up and blows Richie’s hair into his face in response. He rolls his eyes, brushes it out of the way, and keeps walking, soon turning all his focus to the numbers on the houses. Suddenly, the file under his arm feels heavy. What if he’s wrong about Beverly and Tom? He’ll have nothing to go off of to solve this case that he  _ has  _ to solve. Now it’s a matter of personal pride.  

11796 Neibolt Street. The house is painted a boring dark brown color, and the shutters have started to break in front of the windows. Even from outside, there’s a sense of something foreboding about what is by all means just a house that’s seen better days. Unwanted goosebumps spring up on Richie’s arms and don’t go away, even when he rubs them. He has to steel himself a surprising amount in order to gain the courage to walk up the rickety porch and knock on the heavy front door. It’s a heavy, hollow sound. 

“One minute!”

Sweet and kind of soft, the woman’s voice is pretty and doesn’t quite fit with the house in which she lives. Richie awkwardly shifts from foot to foot, making the wood creak as he waits. Finally, the door swings open. 

In front of him is the girl from the picture on Bill’s desk, but much older and with more tension in her features. Wild orange curls have been scraped into a messy bun that highlights her gaunt face and dark under eye circles. The string of the apron around her waist is doubled around her thin frame twice. Her whole body seems to have a quiver to it. 

“Are you Beverly Rogan?”

She nods. 

“Richie Tozier, FBI. Can I come in?”

“Got a badge?”

She has a certain expression on her face between fear and apprehension as she peers around Richie. 

“No ma’am, not on me, but-“ he smiles at her as warmly as he can manage. “I’m a friend of Eddie and Bill’s. And I’m here to help you.”

Once again, Beverly scans the streets nervously. Letting him inside isn’t ideal, but she doesn’t seem to want anyone to see Richie standing at her door. Dragging her feet, she steps to the side to let him in. 

Her house smells pleasantly of bacon and eggs Richie assumes that had made up their breakfast that morning. She beckons him after her as she walks toward what is quickly revealed to be the kitchen. Almost immediately, she makes her way to the sink and pulls on rubber gloves to scrub at the dishes. If she didn’t occasionally glance back at Richie, he’d think she forgets he’s there. 

“I want to ask you a couple questions about the police report you filed, and about your husband, if that’s alright.”

“You said you’re friends with Eddie and Bill? They don’t like Tom,” she says. “They’re convinced that he’s hurting me or something.”

_ Choose your words very carefully, Richard.  _

Richie opens his folder and pulls out her statement and Tom’s. “I don’t think that you were lying or drinking. You know, last night, I was going through it and I found a code in your statement. It was a simple one, but I found it. Did you use a code?”

She drops the plate in her hand into the sink unceremoniously. Luckily, it doesn’t break. 

“I’m gonna take that as a yes. You know something, and if you tell me what it is, I can protect you from whatever it is you’re scared of.”

For a moment it seems like Beverly might open up to him; her eyes look a little brighter, a little more hopeful, and she sets down her dishes and takes off her gloves. Instead of sitting down with Richie, however, she goes to the fridge and grabs a beer. A bottle opener on the fridge bends off the cap and collects it in a small tray to be discarded later. It settles on the table in front of Richie. Still, she rifles through the kitchen drawer for something before sitting down. A cigarette comes up in her palm, lit on a candle burning on the kitchen counter. They’re Camels, according to the pack. 

“Tom isn’t a bad guy, really,” Beverly says between drags of her cigarette. “He just worries about me a lot. Wants the best for me.”

Richie’s eyes land on Beverly’s wrists. Her long sleeves have been rolled up for the dishes, and she hasn’t fixed them. Mottled bruising circles the frail bones. 

“Does the best for you involve restraining you?”

If he had any doubt before, it disappears at the way Beverly’s eyes flick automatically to her arms and she pushes her sleeves down. She stutters on a response that doesn’t come for a long time, cigarette forgotten between her bony fingers. 

“I know we’ve just met. But it’s my job to protect people, okay? I’m a federal agent. I can help you, you just have to let me.”

She seems to think for a long time, during which Richie actually drinks some of the beer she brought him. He’s never really liked drinking, but the taste is familiar and gives him something to focus on until Beverly responds. The sun shines through the window above the sink and onto the files, illuminating light particles as it does. They remind Richie of the smattering of freckles on Beverly’s cheeks that stick out too much against her ghostly complexion. 

“You promise you can help?”

“I promise.”

Before Beverly stands up, she puts out her cigarette on the wooden table. It’ll leave a lasting burn, but she doesn’t seem to care. Richie follows her without a word, just like when they came to the kitchen. His brain catalogues the house, notes the beer bottles on the floor in the living room, the scent of sweat and stale booze, the splatter of blood on the wallpaper. 

Beverly takes them outside through a back door. Their yard is pretty, with blossoming flowers and with a carpet of grass. The entrance to the storm cellar sticks out like a sore thumb. A heavy padlock holds the rotting wood shut. 

“I had his key duplicated when he was drunk a few months ago so I could bring them food when he’s not home. He doesn’t know I have it.”

Mentally, Richie prepares himself for whatever he’s about to see. The key Beverly produces from her apron pocket jingles into the lock and makes an odd click as it opens. She pauses like she’s doing the same as Richie. 

When the cellar doors open, an awful stench hits Richie’s nose. Blood, rot, piss, vomit, all wash over him. For a moment, his thoughts flicker back to Mr. Gray. 

_ Get used to it, Richard _ . 

No. He can’t let memories get in the way. 

Beverly steps back and wrings her hands. “I- Tom doesn’t know I bring them food. He’d kill me. He’d kill them. He can’t know that I- that I showed you either.” 

Instead of getting as far away as possible, Richie kneels in the grass and leans over the doors to look down the steps. Little kids are chained to the walls and floor. One matted head of hair is vaguely recognizable as the girl who went missing two nights ago. 

“I need you to do me a favor,” Richie says, pulling his phone out of his pocket and unlocking it without looking away from the horrors in front of him. “Go into my contacts and call Stan. I want you to tell him your name and your address and tell him that he needs to come here immediately.”

He barely hears her talking to Stan, too busy climbing down into the cellar. The children flinch away from his movements and one raises their hands in front of their face. 

“Shh, it’s okay,” Richie whispers. “I’m here to help you. Can you tell me your names?”

They don’t respond. 

“That’s okay. Give me a sec and I’ll find something to get you out of here. You’re gonna be just fine.”

Richie hears creaking and looks up. Tom’s face leers behind Beverly. She’s shut her eyes tightly, glossy tears leaking from the corners. 

_ I’m sorry _ , she mouths. 

“Your faggot friend Eddie and I are gonna have some fun. Be good.”

The cellar door slams shut, plunging Richie and the children into darkness. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So,,,,,,,,,,,,,, got any thoughts about this ch?


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (:

One of the children whimpers, from fear or pain or hunger, Richie can’t tell.

“My name’s Richie, I’m a police officer,” he says as loudly as he dares. “We’re all gonna get out of here. My friend Stan is coming to help.”

He feels around in the dark. There’s the chains, sticky fluids he doesn’t want to think about, and four solid walls. The only way out is the way he came, which has been padlocked again by Rogan. Familiar fear pulses behind Richie’s eyes, and he can’t push it down, but now is not the time to panic. Four little kids need him to think clearly and get out. Eddie needs him to think clearly and get out. All that Richie has in his pockets are a switchblade and his wallet, nothing helpful.

Just as he’s trying to think of a way to break the cellar doors, they open on their own. Tom has a gun to Eddie’s head, dragging him carefully down the steps and taking the time to shut the cellar again.

“Up against the wall,” Tom growls. All the children shrink back against it. “You too, Wolfhard- Tozier- whoever the fuck you are.”

Raising his hands up, palms outward, Richie presses himself to the wall. With a click, an overhead light turns on, illuminating the stains on the floor and the injuries on the kids. Missing arm. Bloody, unrecognizable face. Badly broken leg. It’s impossible to look. Eddie’s face is just as hard to focus on- his lip is split open and swelling, clumps of blood have dried his hair in a patch on the left side of his head. His expression is a mixture of pain and something else.

Beverly hasn’t come down at all. She could be dead, or she could be in on this, which Richie finds extremely unlikely. The fear she had of Tom was too real for her to be a killer as well.

“Tom, don’t do something you’re gonna regret. Let Detective Kaspbrak go, you don’t have to hurt anyone else.” Saying that almost never works, but Richie has to try. “I need you to let us out of here.”

He looks at Richie closely, sizing him up. Tom is taller, broader than him, and clearly has no qualms being violent. A physical fight is one he’d win. Richie can try and talk him down, or he can stall until help comes. Based on what he knows about Tom and about the kills, talking him down won’t work. Time is ticking. Eddie shuts his eyes and starts whispering a prayer. He’s scared, Richie realizes. 

“Tell me what this is about, Tom,” he says in the calmest voice he can muster. 

No answer. 

Tom lowers the gun from Eddie’s head, but before Richie can sigh in relief, it goes off. White spots flicker across his vision in response to the pain in his leg. His ears are now ringing from the loud noise in an enclosed space like this. Richie thinks Eddie and the children, and maybe himself, all scream. By the time Richie can see again, the gun is to Eddie’s temple once more. This has very clearly been a warning to keep his mouth shut, one he has no choice but to heed. 

“Who’s Stan?” Tom asks Eddie, his words low and threatening in his ear, just loud enough for Richie to make out. He must have seen Beverly trying to call him. “Who is he you fucking faggot?”

“He’s n-new in town.”

His focus shifts to Richie. “Just like your boyfriend?”

Before Eddie answers, someone bangs on the shed door. “Tom Rogan, this is the police, open up.” Stan’s familiar voice washes over Richie, calming him more than he’d care to admit. 

“Touch the cellar door again and I’ll kill them.”

The consequent mumbling is too quiet for Richie to make out. Discussion on how to solve this problem that’s arisen because Richie couldn’t back off. Now Eddie’s in danger. Eddie, who got sick looking at the bodies. Eddie, who helped Richie sleep. Eddie, who has known Richie for two days and that’s all. Somehow, it feels like it’s been much longer than that since they met. 

Eddie catches Richie’s eye and shakes his head minutely.  _ Don’t _ . He wants to scream back what is Eddie asking him not to do, but he knows better. 

“I need some proof they’re still alive, Tom.”

“Tozier,” Tom says as loudly as he dares. 

_ Think, Richard.  _

A long, slow, deep breath in to steady his voice. “We’re alive. Eddie and I are alive. There’s a couple kids down here, I don’t know if-“

The resolute sound of Tom’s gun cocking cuts through Richie’s words. He looks into Tom’s eyes and sees something feral and inhuman. Almost animal. If Richie messes up, it will mean Eddie’s brains painting the walls. The detective who seemed so old this morning now looks younger, with his trembling bottom lip and glassy eyes. 

“I don’t know. Listen, Tom has a gun, and he’s got it to Eddie’s head. He’s not scared to shoot. You have to do what he says.”

Whatever it is that Tom may choose to say. Part of Richie wants to demand to trade places with Eddie because he’s not afraid to die, and Eddie has to live to feed that stupid fish on his coffee table. 

More murmuring outside. Stan barks for someone to do something  _ now _ and Richie flinches. Anything too sudden could cost Eddie’s life.  No one makes a noise for a long time, except for the sniffling of one of the kids. They’ve probably gotten sick. And even once that’s been overcome, there will be physical and emotional scars haunting them until the day that they die. 

“Tom? It’s me, Bev.”

Tom’s eyes soften for just a moment at the voice in the megaphone. “Get out of here, Bevvy. Don’t make this worse for yourself.”

“I’m sorry-”

“You should be. Bringing strangers back here. You know better.”

“I do, I do Tom. But please, please let them go. You and me, we can get out of here. We can go to New York like you always wanted.”

She can’t see him, but Tom still shakes his head. “You know we can’t.”

There’s the soft noise of her hands on the wood, like she’s placed her palms on it to reach out to Tom through the cellar doors. The megaphone is presumably taken away from her because her sobs are fairly quiet. 

Richie focuses on Tom, on the way his face changes. The gun moves away from Eddie’s head a second time. Instinctively, Richie takes a step forward. He won’t let Tom shoot him again. Three feet away is the weapon that currently has everyone afraid. If he could only reach it, he could get everyone out and kill Tom where he stands. 

This time, Richie grits his teeth at the sound of the gun instead of making a noise. Beverly yelps above him. A single white circle of light shines through the doors. Thick, red blood drips down through it, hitting the cement steps with a soft  _ plink _ . He shot her. He actually shot her.

“Pull that shit again, and the faggot’s next.”

“Are you and the hostages okay, Richie?” Stan asks. “Tell me how bad everyone’s hurt.”

Tom nods. 

“I got shot in the thigh. Eddie looks to have a head injury of some kind from what I can see. The-” Richie looks between Tom and the gun. “I can’t assess anymore damage because it’s kind of dark down here. Get a bus for when this is over.” 

“Ambulance’s already here, but it’s taking Ms. Rogan. There’ll be another.”

“May need more.”

Tom stares at the hole in the cellar with an unsure expression on his face.

“How is she? Will she live?” Richie asks.

“Don’t know yet.”

Finally, finally, they’ve struck a nerve in Tom. His brows are creased above his heavy set eyes, and his mouth is pulled down at the corners. Against the concrete floor, his feet tap and shift restlessly. What can’t be more than five or ten minutes seem to have dragged on for hours and hours. Eddie wrenches his eyes open and looks at some point that can’t exist within this room. His tense muscles begin to shake in Tom’s hold. Soon, something’s going to happen, and everyone knows it. Richie goes to shift his weight and cries out, crumpling to the floor. In his adrenaline, he’d forgotten about being shot.

“Richie? Everything okay?”

No indication from Tom whether or not he should speak, so Richie does. “I’m okay. Just forgot for a second there that there’s a fucking hole in my leg.”

He wants to smack himself for saying it.

“Can we send a paramedic down, Tom? For Richie and Eddie and you, if you need it?”

There’s no need for Richie to look to know that Tom won’t allow it. He feels it. “He said no. I think it’s time, Stan.”

“Time for what, faggot?” Tom sneers, but panic is taking over his features. “You do  _ anything _ and I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill him.” 

Richie isn’t listening. “Eddie, sweetheart, I need you to trust me. Do you trust me?” A tiny nod. “Good. Stan, NOW!”

Instinct takes over Richie’s entire mind and body. He goes straight for Tom’s wrist and jerks it away from Eddie. A shot goes off. Richie doesn’t hear it. Everything is dark and it hurts when the back of his skull slams against something. Dizzy, the world is swimming. Weight on his chest and stomach, then on his throat, and he can’t breathe. His hands go up and push at a face, pinching and poking until his fingers go into something soft and there’s a piercing wail. The weight lessens. Struggling to sit up, Richie almost makes it.

Something drags him to his feet by his hair and the pressure on his neck returns, even worse. He can’t breathe at all. 

Screaming. People are screaming.

A face swims in front of Richie’s vision, pale and loud and now there’s a gun in front of it, aimed right above his head at something. Everything hurts so much. Loud, loud cracking right in front of his head and it’s ear splitting.

Somehow he winds up on the floor, crying salty tears that burn when they hit a scrape on his cheek. “Richie? Can you hear me?” Someone holds his face up. “Give me something, tell me you can hear me.” He can hear, but his body doesn’t respond to any of the jumbled commands his brain manages to come up with. “You’re gonna be okay, Rich.”

More people come down, including a man with rubbery blue gloves who probes the back of Richie’s head with nimble fingers. Those same hands come back stained. 

“Move!”

A third man, this one with a golden halo around his head that might be hair. He doesn’t try to touch Richie at all, but he wants to, judging by his twitching fingers. He’s talking, talking quickly and loudly, and it’s impossible to comprehend whatever it is he’s trying to say. 

Richie sits up with tremendous effort. Around the small room, there’s a bustle of activity. Limp, emaciated, tiny bodies are carried away. Someone lies on the floor with shiny silver encasing their wrists. Three concerned faces continue to peer at Richie and try to get him to speak. His tongue is filling up his mouth and can’t make words. 

A dull ache settles over his entire body, throbbing at his head, his leg, his shoulder. More loud yelling that hurts Richie’s ears. 

He’s pushed back to lie flat on the ground. Hands cup his jaw, holding his head in place. Then he’s being lifted up off the ground. Smooth, easy transport. Bright light. The grass tickles his skin. Everywhere Richie looks is stained with dark, angry, sticky red. 

“Try and stay awake, sir. You can’t sleep right now.”

White pads press to his shoulder and thigh. It vaguely stings but the most protest he can muster is a pained noise in the back of his throat. 

“Richie, you’re gonna be okay. I promise you’ll be fine. We got him. You’re gonna be just fine. Deep breath.”

For a long time, someone gives him those soft praises while he drifts in and out of consciousness. Eventually, something warm and rubber presses around his face. He breathes. Oxygen in his lungs. Tired. Can’t. Up. Soft. Moving. Yelling. Cold. Sleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the wait, my internet is down!

When Richie wakes up, he’s disoriented. The last thing he remembers is what he can only assume was an oxygen mask being placed on his face as he was loaded into an ambulance. The hospital room he’s woken up in has nice light blue curtains around his bed and bracketing the window currently letting natural light in. Most of his thoughts are fuzzy at the edges from whatever his IV drips into his veins. Flowers cover his entire bedside table, one of which has a  _ Get Well Soon _ balloon attached to it. 

The call button in Richie’s limp fingers draws his attention. He clicks it down, which shouldn’t be as hard as it is. His muscles are weak, out of practice. How long has he been out?

After a couple minutes, a nurse with a bright smile comes in. “Good morning Richie,” he says. In one hand is a bottle of water with a bright green bendy straw. He slides the other hand behind Richie’s skull, cradling it, and lifts the straw to his chapped lips. Richie greedily drinks, glad for the moisture in his dry mouth and throat. The nurse, upon closer inspection, looks like the fifth kid from Bill’s photograph. “My name’s Mike, I’m one of the nurses here at Mercy.” Mike pulls the water away and sets it on the side table with all the flowers. “In a few minutes, I’ll call your friends, but I want to run some checks first.”

First, Mike has Richie wiggle his fingers and toes. Then he shines a light in his eyes to check his pupils. There are a few questions about if Richie remembers his name, or his birthday. He does, and eventually Mike disappears, promising to bring back visitors. 

Stan returns without Mike. For the first time, there’s no scolding coming. The furrowed brows and bitten inner cheek preceding Stan’s lectures aren’t present. Instead, his eyes are wide and his footsteps ginger. He sits in a chair beside Richie’s bed, takes his cold hand in two warm ones, and pulls them up against a face scratchy with stubble that Stan always shaves off first thing in the morning. How long has Richie been out? Why is Stan acting so weird?

“You look like someone died,” Richie laughs nervously.

“You almost did. What the fuck were you thinking, Richie?”

Most of whatever happened is a blur. He barely remembers anything, let alone what he was thinking about at the time. What he did, he knows he did on instinct. People were in danger. 

“I don’t remember much. It- everything was dark and loud. Someone was going to get hurt. I did what I had to.”

Like he’s been burned, Stan drops Richie’s hand so that it falls back to the bed. There are tears in Stan’s eyes, welling up, dripping down. Never in all the years that Richie’s known him, has he ever cried. Not when a little boy died on his arms. Not when he had to shoot a broken, sobbing woman to save his life. Not when his parents died. Not when he broke three ribs. Stan does not cry. 

“You should have waited. Tom had a gun to Eddie’s head. We were going to get you out of there. What you did was rash and stupid and you nearly  _ fucking died.  _ You’ve been unconscious for days. I didn’t know if you were ever going to wake up.”

“Is Eddie okay?”

Now the anger.

Stan stands up and paces the room. “He’s fine. He had a few scrapes, that’s it. But that’s not the fucking point! You were reckless! What am I supposed to do if you die?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not.”

He isn’t. There’s nothing to be sorry for, in Richie’s mind. It was his life or Eddie’s, and he chose Eddie’s. Given the chance, he would do it again. This hospital room is worth knowing that Eddie is okay. 

Richie observes his body and mentally inventories his injuries. His thigh, where he was- shot? Yes, shot. The same on his shoulder. His head is bandaged where it… where it smacked against the floor, when Tom tackled him. His body has various other scrapes, none of which are too important.

“The kids, and Beverly?”

“Beverly’s okay. They couldn’t save two of the kids, and the third’s gonna live without an arm.”

Guilt.

If he had found Tom a little earlier, if he made just a little more sense explaining to everyone why it was Tom, maybe he could have saved those lives. Maybe. Maybe is better than the certainty that two of them are gone.

Something that Stan sees in the expression on Richie’s face makes him sit back down and take Richie’s hand in his again. They don’t talk anymore, simply enjoying each other’s company for a while. Both seem to fall into a sort of trance, in which the outside world fades away. 

It breaks when Stan sits up and straight and pulls out his phone. “Eddie wants to see you. I’ve got to go.”

“Why?”

“One visitor at a time.”

Stan’s smile is bitter and tight. He squeezes Richie’s hand before he leaves. 

After he’s gone, no one comes for a few minutes. Left alone to his thoughts, bits and pieces come back to Richie slowly. He had called out for Stan to break the cellar doors while he grabbed Tom’s arm to move the gun. Without the element of surprise to allow him to overpower Tom in that moment, Eddie would have been shot. After the gun went off- presumably hitting Richie’s shoulder- Tom had shoved him and he fell to the floor, where he hit his head on the concrete floor, and hard. The details get hazy here. Maybe Tom dropped Eddie, or pushed him, or something, because then Richie was getting choked by Tom’s weight on his chest and hand on his neck. Something made Tom stand up, dragging Richie with him as a human shield. He was in a chokehold. Eddie picked up Tom’s gun and threatened him with it. At that point, Richie thinks that Stan got the cellar doors open. Eddie had tried to shoot Tom and missed, making the bullet ricochet off the wall and bury itself in Tom’s hip. That brought him down. Then Richie was on the floor, crying, struggling to breathe. Someone, probably Eddie, grabbed his face and promised him he’d be okay. Seconds later, Stan and the paramedic came along. They carried him up the stairs and laid him in the grass until an ambulance came along. 

_ You should be dead.  _

He should. 

Eddie comes in. The skin around his left eye is stained in yellows and browns, bruises a few days old, and steri strips lay secure over a scratch on his eyebrow, pinpricks of dried blood showing through. He looks a little worse for wear, but there’s color to his cheeks and breath in his lungs. He’s alive. 

“You had us all pretty scared for awhile,” he says as he takes Stan’s seat. “Hit your head hard.”

“I couldn’t let him shoot you.”

“I’m an officer. You should have been worrying about yourself or the kids.”

Halfway through what Richie had intended to be a shrug, he winces and lets his arms drop. Simple movements are more of a hassle than they should be and it’s really getting on his nerves right now. Part of Richie just wants to stand up and start walking as a giant  _ fuck you  _ to Tom. He knows he shouldn’t and probably can’t. 

“I really fucked things up, didn’t I?”

A startled look overtakes Eddie’s face. “What? No! Richie, why would you think that? You were right about Tom. You didn’t technically conduct a search on his house. Any longer and Tom would have more casualties. What you did was heroic. Stupid, but heroic. So heroic, in fact, that you get to talk about it in court.”

Is Tom pleading not guilty? How is that possible? There’s no doubt that he’s the one who did all this, not when it was his house, he was the violent instigator, and Beverly led Richie to the cellar. Any jury with a brain will convict. 

“He’s obviously guilty.”

Eddie smiles bitterly. “His defense is not guilty by reason of insanity. On the murders, attempts, aggravated assault of a police officer, and domestic abuse of Bev. They wanna say he’s mentally unstable because of childhood trauma or some shit that somehow makes this not his fault. Hospitalization for life is preferable to the death penalty.” He won’t look Richie in the eyes. “I think that the jury will believe him.”

“Probably. I just have one question.” A soft hum prompts him to continue. “What bit off the limbs? It was something with teeth.”

That’s one question that Richie wants answered more than anything else in the world. More than what Tom’s motives were, more than why Beverly married him, more than how he kept the kids a secret. All of those things can be figured out through profiling, which Richie does everyday. What bit the kids? He can’t figure that out on his own. Nothing he’s ever heard of matches the injuries. Not knowing will haunt him forever. 

“I still don’t know, and he won’t tell. Bill’s been doing a thorough search of Rogan’s property though, so maybe he’ll find something. Two days, and nothing so far.”

“I was out for two days?”

The amount of flowers make more sense now. Maybe Stan wasn’t so crazy for being afraid that Richie might die- he’s had some close calls, but never quite like this. He’s already tired again, drained of energy by the simple act of talking to Stan and Eddie. As it pulls at him more and more, despite Eddie’s words, he fights against the desire to sleep again. Out of nowhere, he’s afraid he won’t wake back up.

More words that seem to be travelling through water to reach Richie’s ears come from Eddie’s mouth. His lips, pink and bitten raw, press to his temple gently in a barely-there touch. To be cared for, to be comforted, is so foreign but Richie never wants it to end. He protests in the back of his throat when Eddie pulls away. 

His eyes slip shut, blink open a few times, and then shut for good. The last thing he feels before falling back asleep is the feather light brush of Eddie giving him a chaste kiss on the corner of his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof ouch my bones,,,, any thoughts?


	12. Chapter 12

One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Richie makes his way slowly to the visitor’s center of the Derry County jail. If Stan or Eddie find out he’s here as opposed to Bev’s house like he said, they’d kill him. In the couple weeks since Richie came home from the hospital, they’ve developed a close bond. Close enough that she agreed to lie for him. Even if she doesn’t understand why Richie needs to do this, she gets that he does. Before he left, she even went so far as to share a smoke with him and tell him what she’s learned about getting information from Tom. The key is to pretend you don’t care, she had said. That might be a little difficult, considering that Richie is only visiting for the information, but he can do it. He’s Richie Tozier, profiler and detective extraordinaire- he can do this.

“Sign in,” commands the old man at the desk in a reedy Irish accent. His weathered skin has seen better days, and his shaky hands attest to his age. Officer Nell, according to his name plate, has Richie produce ID before he’s allowed back to see Tom. Even then, he’s hesitant. “We have cameras in there, boy. Don’t try anythin’ stupid.”

“I’m a federal agent, sir, I want to ask him some questions. Here’s my badge-”

He starts to pull it out, but Nell shakes his head and lets Richie back to the visiting room to see Tom. The room itself is dingy, small, and full of furniture that’s probably older than he is. Nell tells him that he’ll go fetch Tom, and just to wait. Richie wrinkles his nose as he sits down in the disgusting chair. If Stan were here, he’d have a conniption fit. That’s the reason why Richie does all the prison interviews, even when he isn’t conducting them secretly. 

In just a few short moments, Nell leads Tom in. His muscular physique looks less intimidating when it’s held in an old, stained jumpsuit, cuffed, with his hair a mess and his jaw unshaven. “Rogan,” Richie greets coldly, pulling out his phone and opening the voice recorder. “I’d like to ask you some questions about the case.”

“Aren’t I entitled to my lawyer?”

“You are.” 

If he wants a lawyer, Richie will have to wait for counsel to show up, or for another day when Tom’s lawyer can make it down.

“I don’t want to deal with his whiny ass right now, so go ahead and question me.”

Richie struggles not to let out a sigh of relief. The questions he’s been asking for the entirety of this case seem to get stuck in his throat. He can’t bring any of them to the forefront of his mouth. Tom is staring at him expectantly, but Nell, who sits in the corner, has become distracted by something on his cellphone. It must be pleasant, judging by his easy smile.

“But for every question you want me to answer, I get to ask you a question myself. Deal?”

There’s no way to tell exactly what it is that Tom wants to know, but Richie has to risk whatever questions he’s about to be asked if that’s what it takes to get some answers. Nothing bothers Richie more than a case that he can’t get all the answers to. In his mind’s eye, Richie thinks of how afraid Eddie looked, his head held tightly by a madman with a .22 caliber. He owes him that much.

“Deal.”

“I get the first question,” Tom commands, stretching his legs under the table so that Richie has to move his own. “What’s your real name?”

“Richie Tozier. My turn- what was your childhood like?”

Tom considers the question for a long time, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Eventually, Richie decides to ask again, but the second he opens his mouth, Tom holds up a finger to silence him. He tells Richie a story about how when he was a little boy, his mother and him would bake pies for the local bakesale. After twenty minutes of it, he laughs.

“But that’s not what you wanna hear about, Tozier. 

You wanna know why I did it. My turn. Why’re you a cop? You seem a little too obsessed for it.”

How much is too much to tell? “I wanted to help people.” That’s true enough. “Tell me then, Tom- why did you do it?”

“Because I’m crazy, remember? I have no control over my mood swings and violence.”

They go back and forth like that for a while. Tom manages to learn about how Stan and Richie are close friends, but Richie’s been staying at Eddie’s, the reason that Richie took the case, and how long he’s been a profiler. Richie learns that Tom had a decent childhood, he thinks Beverly’s a whore, he used modified bear traps on the children, and he is dangerously violent, but not criminally insane. It should be enough proof to win the case, supposedly, but Richie still doesn’t feel satisfied when he sets on his way home.

He’s being stupid. He got the answers he wanted, but it didn’t make him feel better. 

On the walk home, he has to pause a few times to catch his breath. His muscles and lungs have yet to acclimate to life not confined to a hospital bed. Luckily, it’s getting dark, so no one is around to witness what he perceives to be his deepest shame at the moment. In his pocket, his phone buzzes. Eddie’s contact pops up on the screen.

He answers it. “Hey Eds, everything okay?”

“I stopped by Bev’s to give you a ride home so you wouldn’t have to walk, and you weren’t there. She won’t tell me where you went.” Richie wants to lie and say that he was out getting groceries or just taking a walk or something, but there’s no point. Eddie will know it isn’t true and Richie’s been trying to be more honest since the whole near-death-experience thing anyways.  “Are you there?”

“Um, yeah, I’m here. I uh, went to visit Tom. And before you yell at me, I got a lot of information and I’m on my way back.”

“Stay where you are, I’ll come pick you up.”

He glances up at the street sign and reads it off into the phone before hanging up. The exertion of walking to and from the station has made his bad leg ache. Later, Eddie will probably be mad about that too, and say that Richie should have at least had the foresight to call a cab. The sky, already dark with clouds, starts to open up while Richie waits. Fat, heavy raindrops drip down on his curls. Before the rain, the humidity had it frizzy enough. Now it’ll be an absolute mess. Before long, Richie’s clothes are soaked through and thunder has begun to roll in the statically charged air. He’s shivering.

Finally Eddie’s car rolls up. Richie opens the door to the front seat and slides in. He feels bad dripping all over the nice seats, but Eddie seems more preoccupied with turning the heat all the way up to dispel the chill that’s settled into Richie’s very bones. They’re quiet on the way home.

When they arrive, Eddie helps Richie out of the car and promptly sends him straight to the shower to keep warming up and get into dry clothes. His reflection in the mirror above the counter is not the one he’s used to. The skin of his face is pulled tight, making him look more skeletal than human. He shakes when he moves. More scars, fresh scars, pattern his skin like the freckles spanning his cheeks and shoulders. He hates what he sees even more than when he first arrived in Derry and used this shower.

_ You’re a disgusting waste of space. Richard, I’m doing you a favor. _

Richie digs his nails into his palms, reopening half-healed wounds. Not even Stan, his best friend, has bothered to talk to him much since he got home. Pulling a stunt like he did must have finally made him realize what a disaster Richie actually is. He can’t even bear to look at his own reflection, and turns away.

 

The trial seems to drag on and on and on, leaving Richie and Stan stranded in Derry for three months. It’s two more before the trial even begins, and they can’t leave until the verdict because of their roles in testifying. For the entire time, they don’t share more than a couple sentences at once. Richie’s impulse decision has driven a wedge between them that doesn’t seem fixable. Whenever he does see Stan around, it’s in the company of Bill. According to Eddie, they’re dating, and he’s never seen Bill happier. Richie has to agree that Stan looks happy too.

Rogan pleads not guilty by reason of insanity to everything except abusing Beverly- that’s just plain not guilty. Time and time again, Richie goes over evidence looking for anything to prove Tom’s state of mind, but he finds nothing. Every time he’s asked by the attorneys, he dutifully tells them the truth: Tom had looked like a cornered animal, not a functioning human being, when he had held them all hostage. He has to testify about Beverly too, and how shaken up she was. A forensics team checks out the ‘blood’ he had seen in their apartment, only to find that none of it was actually blood.

Bev and Eddie hold Richie’s hands so tightly when Tom’s convictions are read off that it’s borderline painful. He doesn’t say anything because he’s sure his own grip is as tight. On the murders, they find him guilty. On the hostage situation, not guilty. On domestic abuse, not guilty. Beverly cries against Richie’s chest and Eddie walks out of the room speechlessly while the courtroom erupts in discontent. He stays for sentencing- life in prison without parole.

The next day, Richie begins to pack up his things. Although he didn’t bring much to Derry, he’s accumulated odds and ends like mementos from Eddie and a tee shirt that says “I <3 Derry” in thick black letters. The memories that’ll come home along with the extra baggage may be enough to eventually make him throw it all out.

“Where’re you going?” Eddie asks from the kitchen. He’s been watching Richie pack the entire time, but hasn’t commented until now. “Or did you just now figure out the grand skill of getting your shit together?”

“My flight’s this evening.”

He nearly drops the tea in his hand, only barely managing to hold onto it. “Flight? What- Richie, what flight?”

“I’m going home. This job’s over, there’ll be another one waiting for me,” Richie says. Eddie seems shocked, like it never occurred to him that Richie wouldn’t be staying. With a last rolled up shirt, he closes his suitcase and stands up. He extends the handle of his suitcase so that he can roll it along with him instead of carrying it. “The case is over. Rogan was convicted.”

“I thought- I was hoping- I-”

“I can’t stay.”

It takes more strength than Richie knew he had, but he manages to walk up to Eddie and kiss him twice- once on the lips, once on the forehead. Then he turns and goes back to his suitcase at the front door. He wants to turn around and give a longer, more proper goodbye, but if he does, he might not go.

“Call if you need anything,” he says, and leaves.

A cab is already waiting outside. Richie half expects Tom to be driving it, but it’s just a portly woman in a grey-green turtleneck. She’s brusque, and annoyed that she has to take him all the way to Bill’s apartment on the other side of town, then to the train station. At some point, Richie doesn’t know when, they had moved in together. He only knows because Eddie told him offhandedly.

The driver agrees to wait five minutes before she drives off with all of Richie’s stuff in her trunk.

He walks up to the front door and knocks three times. Truthfully, he almost can’t wait to get home and have everything settle back into normalcy. Cases will be quick and easy, and when they’re solved, he and Stan can have a movie night and laugh and eat junk food. Richie’s kind of fantasizing about the safety and familiarity of his own bed.

It’s Bill who answers the door. Despite the fact that it’s past noon, he’s still in his pajamas with sleep clouding his eyes and pulling his lips down. “R-Richie?”

“Is Stan here? We need to leave.”

That wakes him up. Bill’s eyes widen and he holds up a finger for Richie to wait before disappearing. From his vantage point, he can see the entryway of the apartment. The decor is boring and haphazard, more personal than stylish, but Stan’s presence is evident in the perfect alignment of photos and the rack of neatly organized shoes. Something about it makes him think of settling down and starting a family.

Stan walks up to the door, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a shirt that obviously belongs to Bill. He seems to have just woken up as well. “What do you want?”

“Our flight leaves in four hours, and I know you like to be at the airport early. Do you have your shit together?” Richie asks even though he’s pretty sure he already knows exactly what Stan’s about to say. “Stan?”

“I’m not coming.”

Even though practically knew it was coming, it still feels like a punch in the gut to get confirmation that Stan is abandoning him like this. 

“Look, Richie, I need to settle down. You almost died- you could have died- and I don’t wanna be dead before I’m even thirty. I wanna get married and have kids and grow old and I wanna do it with Bill. I’m sorry, I really am. I already called in and resigned yesterday.”

He doesn’t look sorry. His face is a mask that would be unreadable to most. Having known Stan for years, Richie can just barely see what it is that Stan’s hiding: annoyance. He’s annoyed that he has to explain this, annoyed that Richie dared to show up on his doorstep lik this.

“Yeah. Guess this is goodbye then, right?”

“Right.”

Most people would hug or something, but Richie senses that it would be unwelcome. He nods at Stan and turns back to the cab. Something in him wants to stay in Derry with Stan and Eddie and Beverly and the weird sense of comfort and home that the entire town emanates, but he ignores it.

_ You will always be alone. _

Richie can’t bring himself to argue with Mr. Gray’s voice. Not today. Maybe not for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading this <3 it got into some messes along the way because I had no plan going into it lmao but I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. This was the first chaptered fic I'd written in over a year and the fact that so many of you read along means so much to me you have no idea <3
> 
> I don't know when my next chaptered Reddie fic will come along, but I do oneshots all the time, feel free to check those out, and I'm currently writing a chaptered Stozier fic called "Touch Me" which I think y'all might really enjoy if you wanna give it a chance.
> 
> Love you all, bye <3

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on tumblr @nb-richie


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